News that presidency spokesperson Mac Maharaj’s attorneys laid charges against the Mail & Guardian and two of its journalists on Saturday comes as a bit of a surprise.

The North Gauteng High Court yesterday for the umpteenth time came to the rescue of our democracy (although Ngoako Ramathlodi, who used to be on the fringes of the ANC when its important leaders still had some moral authority, might not agree), granting an urgent interdict prohibiting the apartheid cop, General Richard Mdluli, from fulfilling any functions in the South African Police Service (SAPS) and preventing the Police Commissioner and the Minister of Safety and Security from assigning any functions or duties to Mdluli.

Why is it that so many of our politicians and members of the elite from countries emerging from the long period of destructive colonial conquest and oppression find it so difficult to redefine ourselves and the states we live in without reference to the values, norms and practices of the colonial power which colonised and oppressed us?

One of the most fundamental democratic rights in a constitutional democracy is the right to gather peacefully with others and to take part in protest action, either to convey one’s point of view about an important political or social matter or in support of one’s right to strike. During the apartheid years protest marches and gatherings were often “banned” or violently disrupted by the Police in order to prevent citizens from expressing their anger and disgust at the apartheid regime.

After President John F Kennedy was assassinated, Malcolm X famously said that the assassination was a case of the “chickens coming home to roost,” adding that “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” In other words, he was implying that since the white man had used violence so often and so easily in America (especially against black Americans), it was just cosmic balance that the President would become a victim of violence.

What can ordinary citizens do when the state – at either national, provincial or local government level – fails to fulfil its most basic obligations towards citizens to create the conditions that make it possible for them to live meaningful lives and to flourish? In developing his concept that a modern state is based on social contract between the governed and those who govern, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.