SOUTH AFRICA: Soweto man takes official hostage after two-year wait for ID card, writes Joe Humphreys in Johannesburg
Most people have a breaking point. For Kabelo Thibedi, it came two years after he joined a waiting list at South Africa's department of home affairs for his new identification book.
"You don't exist without an ID," the 23-year-old Johannesburg man said, explaining his frustration. "You can't have a bank account . . . You can't get married . . . You can't do many things . . . you just don't exist." Mr Thibedi made countless efforts to get the documentation to which he was entitled. He wrote letters, he queued to speak to officials. But, eventually, his patience ran out.
In November 2005 he walked into his local home affairs office and took a supervisor hostage with a toy gun. After a six-hour siege, he received the ID he had been looking for via a helicopter-ride from the department's headquarters in Pretoria.
He then exited the office peacefully and - clutching the precious document in his hands - was immediately arrested.
On Thursday Mr Thibedi was sentenced to five years in prison - a punishment many South Africans believe was unreasonably harsh. In fact, some regard the unemployed Soweto man as a hero for rebelling against a heartless, corrupt state bureaucracy.
In the wake of Mr Thibedi's arrest, a columnist with the Sowetan remarked that the real offender in the case was home affairs minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, who "should have been in that courtroom instead, charged with incompetence".
Similar views have been expressed on the national airwaves since Mr Thibedi's sentencing, with some people drawing parallels between today's underperforming state agencies and the Kafkaesque government departments of the apartheid era.
Indeed, anyone going to work or live in South Africa is likely to experience a degree of unnecessary, if not maddening, red tape. On any day, enormous queues snake through local council offices as rate payers try to query, or simply pay, waste and electricity bills.
All departments are experiencing problems - in part driven by an exodus of experienced, predominantly white civil servants over the past 12 years. But home affairs stands out for its ineptitude, according to Democratic Alliance member of parliament Sandy Kalyan, who is the opposition's home affairs spokeswoman and has some sympathy for Mr Thibedi's plight.
While she didn't condone the man's actions, she said lessons could be drawn from his "sheer desperation".
"To add insult to injury, he was given the wrong ID at the end of the siege - which just goes to show how incompetent the department is," she said.
Mr Thibedi's two-year wait for documentation was by no means a record. On the very same day he was sentenced to prison, a 24-year-old Pretoria woman received her identity book after a six-year delay. In that time, she said, she had been unable to either study or work, or to get a birth certificate for her son.
Farcically, other people have been incorrectly declared dead by the department, and yet more have been registered as the wrong sex - with less than humorous consequences for the people involved. Aside from incompetence, home affairs has been hit with a litany of corruption allegations. Investigative reporters with the state broadcaster SABC last week revealed that they had bought fake IDs from home affairs offices in Johannesburg, Germiston, Pretoria, Nelspruit, Pietermaritzburg and Durban for as little as 650 rand (€70) each.
Ms Mapisa-Nqakula has established inquiries into such fraud as part of a shake-up of her department. But Ms Kalyan said: "there is still a lack of leadership. The minister is a lovely person, but she needs to take the finger off the pause button", and in particular to start sacking underperforming officials.
The crisis has not gone unnoticed in the top layers of government, with deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka recently pointing out that errors committed by the home affairs department "can be devastating, traumatic and even destiny-changing to an individual or family". Ms Mlambo-Ngcuka visits Ireland next week to promote cross-Border initiatives aimed at plugging skills gaps in the civil service.
Whatever help Ireland and other countries can give will come too late for Mr Thibedi, however. "He is a sweet boy - not a criminal," his mother said after his arrest. "He doesn't belong in jail. He was just desperate."