Grace under fire – diplomatic scrutiny!

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There have been lots of conflicting stories surrounding the Grace Mugabe diplomatic immunity case for an alleged assault in Johannesburg. The one is: the woman who got beaten over her head with a plug was a bit of a rabble-rouser herself, fighting with people outside clubs and so on. I don’t know how true all of that is, but of course people will always attempt to find the “dirt” on somebody if they’re at the centre of a media storm.

Grace Mugabe is no stranger to a media storm – I mean, her incidents involve inter-continental bashing – she’s reported to have hit photographers, customs officials, and all kinds of people. So Grace(less) Mugabe, as she’s come to be known, was apparently not in the country on official business, which would have allowed her to invoke the diplomatic immunity clause, but it became official the minute she got into trouble.

Like most people, I don’t know what the exact laws are on diplomatic immunity or when it should or shouldn’t apply, but frankly, why is it that a diplomat or somebody that is here on official inter-country business should have the right to beat other people and basically break the law? They must come here and respect the laws of this country like everybody else. So are we going to say that because of diplomatic immunity, one could go to Saudi Arabia, and as a woman go into a place where you should wear a head scarf and not wear one? And when someone questions it because that’s the law of their land, you can say “because I’m a diplomat!”

Surely the law is the law is the law! So are we actually saying that we are not all equal before the law? The fact is: we all should be equal before the law and this kind of behaviour or attitude – that because you’re a politician you should somehow be treated differently – is part of a bigger problem. And that’s why we have blue light brigades, and politicians walking around with muscle men, muscling their way into places, and not being accountable to people because they feel that they are somehow above us. This is not to be stood for!

 So law-schmaw! I don’t care what the Department of International Relations says, this “getting away with it” says a lot about our government and more so a lot about the person committing the crime and using diplomatic immunity as a defence. And when you talk about “international relations”, what is agreeing to allow somebody to come into your country and commit a crime and then leave without prosecution say about what you think of your people?

 And part of what the Department of International Relations cited was: “It was to protect inter-country relations.” They wanted to make sure that we maintain good relations with our neighbours. So these “diplomats” can come here, rape women, traffic drugs, kill, and generally break the law and they will be protected by diplomatic immunity. Is that what we’re saying?

The point I’m making is: the government is saying that the reason we’re not going to prosecute this woman, Grace Mugabe, is because we want to protect the relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe. But don’t you think that “good relationships” start by not coming to our country and beating up our citizens, trashing hotel rooms, and just generally running roughshod over the people of this country? Is this not where the good international relations should start? Certainly not with us letting someone off scot-free because they broke the law.

The other fact is that we don’t have any visa requirements for SADAC countries, which effectively means that Mugabe, who now owns property in South Africa, can come in whenever she wants and do whatever she wants with our people and we’ll just sit back and take it. I mean, she doesn’t have to apply for a visa; she just needs to present her passport at immigration and Bob’s your uncle (well, actually her husband in this case)! Her passport won’t be flagged either because her diplomatic immunity has ensured that she doesn’t have a criminal record, even though she committed a crime.

 I don’t actually understand why we have diplomatic immunity in the first place. What is the point of it? There are innumerable cases around the world of diplomats literally getting away with murder because their status allows them to. So effectively this means that someone like Grace Mugabe could be invited to speak at a conference, bring in a whole whack of drugs, and have huge parties and distributes these drugs, beat up people and generally break the law, and that would be okay. After all, we don’t want to sully our relationship with Zimbabwe. And it’s not like they follow proper customs protocols because the plane doesn’t land at OR Tambo Airport but rather at Waterkloof – you know the same airport reserved for the Guptas.

It’s not like they can be searched; they’ll just invoke diplomatic immunity. So when do we as citizens of this country say “enough is enough!”? You can come here and behave like a law-abiding citizen, but if you’re going to break the law, you need to face the consequences. The same rules should apply to everybody.

I think we need a reality check when it comes to all this pomp and ceremony and general bull when it comes to our politicians. Why do we elevate what is essentially a public servant – a civil servant – people who are voted in by us, paid for by our taxes, to this level? Surely they’re not 'untouchable' in the mafia sense of being untouchable?

Grace Mugabe continues to get away with incidents on an international stage so why should she worry about hitting some girl with a plug in South Africa? Well, she should worry about it because if we had any sense we would not allow her back into this country! And what would have happened if that girl defended herself and slapped Grace Mugabe? She would have been charged with assault. Well, that’s exactly what should have happened to Mugabe herself!

On the one level it’s a debate about international laws and protocols and things like that, but put that aside and ask: “What is the right thing to do?” Is it appropriate and right, as a public figure, somebody who’s elevated to the status of being a role model to people, rightly or wrongly, to go and behave like that? And on the other hand, surely the time has come when we need to say: “We need to be treated with a little more respect by our leaders, by the people that we’ve elected, that we fund.”

At no point am I professing to know anything about this girl who got hit on her head with a plug. But what really concerned me were all the comments on Facebook that berated her for not taking an alleged payout from Mugabe when she had the chance to do so. People were saying that she missed her pay date and she gave away her lottery ticket. What does this reaction say about us as a society? For the many people who made those comments, getting a pay date was what it was all about. It wasn’t about principle, or the right thing to do.

At the end of the day, if you strip away all the legal nonsense around diplomatic immunity, what do you get? You just get a criminal; you get somebody who broke the law. The fact that they got away with it, the fact that they are immune to prosecution, does not make them any less of a criminal.

Perhaps the answer is for us to lobby our parliamentarians to change the law. South Africa should be a country that doesn’t provide that safety blanket for people to come in and mess around with it. But in order for us to change the law, we need lawmakers that actually care about this country, but at the moment it seems like we have lost our way.

Do you believe diplomatic immunity is a necessary system?

 You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @terencepillay1, and engage with him there.