THUSO Makhalanyane, the Abia MP, is probably still nursing bruises and aching muscles after being roughed up by the police at a roadblock.
He claims the police beat and dragged him after he objected to their attempt to impound his car over a missing rear number plate.
Makhalanyane says even after he explained that he is an MP, the police strangled him and tore his trousers. They smashed his phone before locking him in a holding cell until another MP intervened to secure his release on the same day.
“I also have bruises on my knees. My body is still in pain,” he claimed.
Muckraker sympathises with Makhalanyane but sees this as a teachable moment for him. Hearing him mourn, Muckraker could not help but sense that Makhalanyane expected some special treatment from our thuggish police because he is an MP.
“If they arrest an MP like that you can imagine what they do to ordinary citizens,” Makhalanyane said in a newspaper interview, glaringly oblivious to what he was implying. Ordinary citizens? Phew!
At that moment, Muckraker was tempted to say ba u file ntho eo u nts’o e batla.
Not because he deserved the harassment and the beating. No! It’s just that he is a blabbermouth. It’s not clear who he was inviting to “imagine” how the police arrest “ordinary citizens”. Suffice it to say most ‘ordinary citizens’ don’t need to imagine police brutality because they see and experience it every day.
Everyone knows someone who has been harassed by those thugs in blue.
Makhalanyane’s people in Abia have always known the police to be roughnecks.
They have probably told Makhalanyane of their ordeal with the police. Yet there was never a time he raised the issue of police brutality in parliament.
He has not raised a motion to discuss the dozens of people killed by the police.
But when he was spanked by the police at a roadblock he clambered the tallest mountain to scream about police brutality. He was on radio stations and in newspapers, crying about the police mishandling him. He cried in parliament too.
It’s not that Makhalanyane doesn’t care about those who have been beaten, tortured and killed by the police.
It’s just that he cares about himself more.
As if the people matter but he matters more.
He knows some people have been killed by the police but the serious issue now is that his knees are bruised and his body is in pain.
It is those bruises and aching muscles that are worth discussing in parliament.
Now you know what matters to him and what keeps him awake at night.
It’s not and it will never be you.
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