Mbeki, Speech by Charles Nqakula, MP, Minister for Safety and Security
13 February 2007
Madam Speaker,
Honourable Members,
The African National Congress (ANC) has started organising its structures,
Comrade President, to give expression to the marching orders you gave at
Witbank, Mpumalanga, on 13 January, as our own input to the fight against crime
in South Africa.
You reminded us on that occasion that "the police service and government
agencies cannot fight crime alone, and that it requires the involvement and
active participation of all communities and all sections of society to meet
this challenge."
Your observation, Comrade President, was a reminder of what we have always
known in the ANC. That question and other matters that were canvassed within
our ranks did not automatically become law in the new South Africa. Some of
them changed in both form and content on the operating table of negotiations.
Discussing the matter of policing in 1992, as part of our overall strategy to
prepare ourselves to govern the country, we said among other things:
"Community policing has now been recognised as more effective because it
understands that it is not the police alone who combat and prevent crime. It is
the community who are largely responsible for criminal prosecutions. They lay
charges, make statements, testify in court, and assist the police in the
performance of their functions. Without this co-operation no police force can
discharge its duties."
Our view, at the time, was that effective policing was not dependent on huge
police numbers but rather on better police-community relations. The key, we
argued, was the ability of the police to root themselves among the people and
work together with the communities in a well-defined partnership to prevent and
combat crime.
Defining that arrangement we said:
"The relationship between the police and the policed should be one of
reciprocal control."
We insisted on the accountability of the police to local communities who
would have to assess police performance against "verifiable standards." We were
clear that "unless the police are rooted in and accountable to the communities
in whose name they police, they will not enjoy the support of those
communities." We may have raised those questions as ANC members but we
understood, Comrade President, that we were addressing national security. We
were clear that national security was a national mailer. It required the
involvement of all South Africans from all walks of life in our country. And
when we spoke about our communities we meant all of them. That continues to be
our position.
Crime, Madam Speaker, is a very emotional matter. Crime is emotional because
it affects many people directly. But, while we must all agree that crime is a
serious matter in South Africa, it is incumbent on all of us as leaders,
Honourable Members, to be logical and rational in our response to the scourge.
There are many South Africans who understand that truth, Comrade President.
They are members of South Africa's various Community Based and Non-Governmental
Organisations, the labour movement, business and religious sectors, as well as
some political parties.
One of the responses must be the mobilisation of our communities to work
together with the police to prevent and combat crime. The people at local level
are the best repository for information. They know who is where and doing what
even when it relates to crime and criminality.
At this juncture, Madam Speaker, allow me to mention, the role that
politicians like the Honourable Patricia de Lille have played in mobilising
residents in the areas where they live to participate in crime prevention. The
Honourable de Lille, together with a number of residents she has helped to
mobilise against crime, takes turns to patrol their area alongside the
police.
There are other experiences, like Mannenberg, where Comrade Mario Wanza
lives. He too has played a leading role in mobilising people in his area to
participate in crime prevention and fighting.
Dr Mzukisi Qobo is of one mind with you, Comrade President, when you say, as
you did on Friday, that "working together to achieve the happiness that comes
with freedom applies equally to the challenge of dealing with crime. Certainly,
we cannot erase that which is ugly and repulsive and claim the happiness that
comes with freedom if communities live in fear, closeted behind walls and
barbed wire, ever anxious in their houses, on the streets and on our roads,
unable freely to enjoy our public spaces. Obviously, we must continue and
further intensify the struggle against crime."
In a column piece he did for the Cape Argus on Friday, Dr Qobo wrote:
"The emergence of a more stable, healthy and balanced society will not come
as a result of technical and administrative work of the government but through
collective ownership of the existing challenges and preparedness to step out of
our comfort zone and be responsible citizens, including through wealth and
skills transfers from areas of high resource concentration to areas of low
resource concentration.
Crime is a collective responsibility and dealing with it would require
fundamental change in the social structure in South Africa, as well as a
serious examination of the state of morality of our society."
Dr Qobo is a Mellon Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, at the
University of Stellenbosch.
No crime in South Africa terrifies our people like serious and violent
crime. That type of crime is visited directly on victims in the form of serious
and violent assault, rape and murder, as well as attempts to cause such
violence.
Research by some independent bodies and the South African Police Service
(SAPS) indicates that most of those crimes happen between people who know one
another, and occur, mainly, in secluded areas including behind the doors of the
homes of either perpetrator or victim.
The police analysed recently 9 623 dockets for murder, attempted murder,
rape, serious and violent assault and common assault. The result of that
analysis was published in the 2005/06 SAPS annual report.
What the exercise revealed was that 81,5% of the murder victims were killed
by persons they knew. The killers in 61,9% of the cases were relatives, friends
or acquaintances of the victims. In 75,9% of rape cases the victims knew the
rapists, while in 56,9% the rapists were relatives, friends or acquaintances of
the victims. Cases of assault showed higher percentages of perpetrators known
to the victims, including relatives, friends or acquaintances.
It seems to me that we need to do more than just policing to deal with such
crimes. I believe that those crimes are a direct consequence of moral decay
within our communities. Others are generated by the social conditions under
which people live.
There surely must come a time, Mr President when, as South Africans, we will
come together and do a thorough assessment of the extent of the damage that
apartheid caused to our people as a whole � oppressed or not oppressed.
Apartheid contributed directly to the destruction of family values that were
built over many centuries by the indigenous people of our country. Apartheid
contributed directly to the collapse of the moral fibre in many of our
communities.
An exhaustive interrogation of that question, therefore, may provide the
answer to the problem of social crime in South Africa.
Meanwhile, the ANC Commission on Religious Affairs intends to place the
matter of social crime, especially the serious and violent kind, on the agenda
of the programme of religious interaction on the moral regeneration campaign.
It is a fact, Madam Speaker, that everywhere the partnership between the
residents and the police has taken root, crime has gone down. This is true of
Alexandra, Sebokeng, Orlando, Motherwell and other places that I will mention
during my Budget Vote speech later this year.
The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and the South African Banking Risk
Information Centre (SABRIC) have partnered the police to deal with armed
robberies in a project that is called Cash Risk Management, or CRIM, in. short.
The relationship has extended to other enterprises, including the retail
sector, and the gambling, entertainment and property industries.
The campaign by the police in the second half of last year which drastically
brought down armed robberies, especially at banks and other financial
institutions as well as cash in transit heists benefited tremendously from the
co-operation with business and many members of our communities, who supplied
the police with valuable information.
The President, through the Presidential Big Business Working Group,
influenced the forging of a relationship between that group and the Justice,
Crime Prevention and Security cluster of Cabinet. That partnership is working
well in the search for the necessary responses to crime in South Africa. A
system of regular interface between the two sides has become an established
norm.
But, allow me, Madam Speaker, to go back to the original point I made about
community-police relationships. One of the most important interventions South
Africa made to realise that objective was the establishment of the Community
Police Forums (CPFs). We must admit, though, that the final product of our
labour was not the formidable structure we thought would help communities "to
assume a more active role in crime prevention and in the policing of their
areas."
The CPFs should have been defined as intermediaries between the people and
the police and should have been given the task to root the police among the
people as a necessary element of the partnership between them. The law
establishing the CPFs could not be faulted except where it assigned the
responsibility to create the structures to the police themselves and charged
them with the responsibility of resourcing the structures. The upshot has been
uneven development of the CPFs.
The ANC believes that we should go back to the original concept and make the
CPFs autonomous bodies that would be responsible to the communities they serve
but work closely with the police in a manner where they would discuss with them
the policing priorities of the given local areas and help assess police
performance on the basis of such priorities.
Given that the CPFs would be responsible to the people who would use
democratic means to establish them, they would have a dynamic relationship with
both the communities and the local government authorities.
It is quite clear, though, that the interventions we need to make relate to
the entire Criminal Justice System. Safety and Security, Justice and
Correctional. Services are already working in an integrated fashion, together
with the country's intelligence community to deal with crime as a united
entity. Without reinventing the wheel, we would like to expand the work of the
CPFs for interventions across the Integrated Justice System.
These matters, Comrade President and Madam Speaker, will be subjected to
further scrutiny at the ANC Policy Conference in June. It is our hope that when
they are endorsed they will come to Parliament where amendments could be made
to existing legislation to create the conditions that our situation demands -
of better community-police relations for our nation, united in action to "erase
that which is ugly and repulsive and claim the happiness that comes with
freedom."
Issued by: Ministry for Safety and Security
13 February 2007
