Police minister Bheki Cele said this week that almost 4,000 police officers charged with crimes, some serious, are still at work. And he didn’t know why. The fact that such a shocking disclosure elicited little alarm is perhaps an indication of the sorry state of the country. We’re at the mercy of criminals who, in turn, are led by the blind and incompetent.
Three months ago Cele told parliament that more than 7,000 officers had been charged with serious crimes, ranging from murder and rape to armed robbery and cash in transit heists, in the previous three years. Of those only 686 were successfully prosecuted. No wonder crime is not abating. A worrying number of officers seem to use their skills and weapons, not to do the job for which they’re paid, but to carry out nefarious deeds. Foxes, it would appear, are guarding the chicken coop. Crime does pay in South Africa. If police are corrupt and lawless, how then do we even begin to stop the depravity and lawlessness in society ? Or is it a question of setting a thief to catch a thief?
The ANC has never been serious about tackling crime. When its deployees took over they behaved almost as though fighting crime was beneath their station. Or they thought crime was an apartheid aberration or conspiracy that would, like the system itself, simply disappear. They thought, I suppose, it was more in their league to rack their brains over weightier matters such as an African renaissance or the national democratic revolution, which they could neither explain to themselves nor figure out how such pie in the sky would bring relief to ordinary people.
At one point they sought to make it a race issue. Those complaining about the soaring crime rate were dismissed as scaremongers, recidivists who yearn for the past, or racists. 'They asserted that crime was a preoccupation of the white suburbs; even though hundreds of black people were butchered in the townships and villages every year'.
It’s as if we’ve rounded up the biggest bunch of dimwits we can find in society and begged them to run our government
But even as they pooh-pooh concerns about the soaring crime rate, they can hardly venture out of their front doors without security, or move around without a heavily guarded convoy, all paid for with our taxes. They wanted to run the government according to the teachings and ideals of Karl Marx. But Marx lived in a different era, different environment, never set foot here, never ran a spaza shop and died a pauper. It’s just ridiculous that some in government would, instead of playing the situation, run things according to fairy tales. People want jobs, well-run schools, qualified staff and medicines in hospitals, and a safe environment. They can’t eat ideology. A crime-free environment is a prerequisite, or a better life for all will forever remain a mirage.
But crime, like corruption, is so endemic that even government seems to have given up. The fact that Cele can publicly claim not to know why crime suspects are still on the beat shows how clueless he is. And yet Cele is always out and about — with his police commissioner in tow — with assurances that violent crime will soon be a thing of the past. His words always ring hollow. Nobody takes him seriously, not even the criminals, who apparently include some of his officers. In any other democratic country such a minister would have fallen on his sword, or have been fired.
By dint of his sheer incompetence, Cele for a while now has been inviting President Cyril Ramaphosa to give him the sack. Crime statistics always make for grim reading. According to the Institute for Security Studies, more people were killed in the first quarter of this year than in any other quarter on record, except for last year, which was horrific. Even where decreases are recorded in other categories, they often come off a high base. But our do-nothing president is not in the business of depriving comrades of their God-given right to an income. Government, it seems, exists to serve their needs, not the interests of society or its citizens.
But in fairness to Cele, he’s not the only laggard in the cabinet. The whole lot is incompetent. It’s as if we’ve rounded up the biggest bunch of dimwits we can find in society and begged them to run our government.
The criminal justice system is the pits. Poverty is an issue but it’s not the only, or primary, problem. I’ve often wondered why countries poorer than ours seem to have less crime. People come from relatively peaceful countries to commit horrendous crimes here. The reason is that there are no consequences here. People literally get away with murder. A few years ago a guy flew from England with his wife to have her murdered in Cape Town. It took years to extradite him at huge cost to the state. The police promptly botched the case and he got off scot-free.
The National Prosecuting Authority is another weak link. It has incomprehensibly failed to do anything about the VBS debacle, in which poor people were swindled out of their savings by well-heeled politicians. That information is readily available in a well-researched report. And it has just about messed up every state capture case. No wonder, the looters are gloating. Shamila Batohi has been a big disappointment. She’s utterly useless. She vanishes, only to reappear to whinge about a lack of resources. She must go.
The most critical areas in any society are education, health and security. If your people are well educated, healthy and living in a secure environment, they’d fly. The economy — and jobs — would just about take care of itself. We fall short on all three, which is why we’re regressing fast
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