Madam Speaker;
The Premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Honourable Dr. Zweli Mkhize;
Members of the Provincial Executive Council;
Honourable Members of the Provincial Legislature;
Amakhosi AseNdlunkulu present;
Mayors and Councillors of Municipalities;
Excellencies, members of the diplomatic corps;
Director-General and Heads of the various Departments;
The South African Police Service;
Senior officials of government departments;
Membership of the Justice Crime Prevention and Security Cluster;
The leadership of the Community Policing Structures;
Representatives from Al Baraka Bank
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen;
All stakeholders;
Members of the media;
Citizens of KwaZulu-Natal
This afternoon I have the honour to present the budget speech for the Department of Community Safety and Liaison, Budget Vote 9 under the theme ‘People’s Action Against Crime’. This theme resonates well with our Flagship Programme of Building a United Front Against Crime ( BUFAC) and it will be a driving force for our functioning in the Department as a golden thread through all our programmes. We want to make a clarion call for communities, all social formations, youth, families and individuals to actively take a bold stand against crime in their homes, streets, neighbourhoods, communities and the entire province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Through this call, we want to encourage the mobilisation of the people to fight against crime, and to build community based structures that will actively play a meaningful role in the fight against crime. As we pursue our relentless fight against crime, we want the people to form neighbourhood watch groups, community-based patrols, street committees, Community Policing Fora, Community Safety Fora, and to be Volunteers promoting community safety.
In his State of the Nation address, His Excellency, President Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma makes it clear that the fight against crime remains one of the country’s priorities, when he said, and I quote, “We will continue to prioritise crimes against women and children…We will work with communities and other key stakeholders to deal with drug peddling and drug abuse which are tearing some communities apart.” We welcome this call Mr President particularly as it speaks to the proactive crime prevention and crime fighting role of this department working together with the communities and the police.
Building a United Front Against Crime
As we chart our way forward, I wish to thank our Premier, Dr Zweli Mkhize, the Executive Council and the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster members for supporting our department in successfully launching and rolling out the programme of building a united front against crime. This is an integrated anti-crime strategy which seeks to rally communities behind the crime fighting cause, using Operation Hlasela as a vehicle to roll it out, throughout the province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Honourable members, it is through this strategy that the department is engaging in a holistic, integrated, people driven and people centred approach in the fight against crime. Operation Hlasela has been successfully launched and implemented in more than six priority areas of KwaZulu-Natal.
In the forthcoming financial year, its implementation will be accelerated. Through Operation Hlasela, our strategy is to create ‘pockets of excellence’ where communities, civil society formations and government work closely together to eliminate crime and create safe streets, safe communities, and safe villages and towns.
We are already seeing positive results of our programme. Operation Hlasela is impacting positively on the fight against crime in that through community mass mobilisation; greater confidence is being built between the police and the community, resulting in communities being more willing to give critical crime-related information to the police, which is needed in order to arrest criminals.
Enhancing service delivery by the police
Honourable members are aware that one of the core functions of this department is to play an oversight role over the Police. The manner in which we do this, is not adversarial, but rather anchored on good working relationships with the Police. As part of this oversight role in the forthcoming financial year, we will look at the issue of community access to police stations. We will continue to make recommendations for the rationalisation of police stations so that all communities enjoy equitable access to justice.Whilst we still have many policing challenges to confront on behalf of the citizens of this province, we remain positive. We regularly thank those exceptional officers who continue to ‘serve and protect’ with pride and dedication. To that end, the department hosts an annual Mec’s Community Awards for Police Excellence. The motivation to our police service provided by these awards cannot be quantified. At this stage Honourable members, allow me to acknowledge the ongoing support of the business sector towards these awards, in the main, Al Baraka Bank who have remained a loyal partner and sponsor of this important event. They are true Builders of a United Front Against Crime. We challenge other Private sector members to match them in this noble cause.
We often hear reports about how badly police conduct themselves and lesser reports on their good work. Allow me to send accolades to the police in KwaZulu-Natal under the stewardship of Lieutenant General Ngobeni for a number of successes achieved. They have achieved a remarkable feat in stabilising communities and dealing with unrest and violence in the Taxi Industry. The rampant violence once characteristic of this province, is no longer evident.
The sporadic killings are now few. Conflict in communities has been reduced substantially. The Police are sending a clear message to the criminals – that they have declared war on the people and that the unity of the Police and the people will defeat them in our province!
The Department of Community Safety and Liaison working together with the police, also plays a leading role in the promotion of peace, democracy and social cohesion through the Communities in Dialogue Programme, as evidenced in a number of areas. Communities in Dialogue will extend to the Presidential Pardons programme, since it is our considered view that when offenders return to their communities, the affected people and the neighbourhood as a whole is consulted and appraised of this development.
The joint collaboration of the Department of Transport and the South African Police Services working under the auspices of the Justice Crime Prevention and Security Cluster task team, called the Taxi Violence Task Team, has contributed positively to the stability in the taxi industry. This task team comprises of senior officials from the Department of Transport, Community Safety and Liaison, the National Intelligence Agency, the South African Police Force, the Directorate of Public Prosecutions and Correctional Services.Our strategy of pursuing cooperation and peaceful engagement has resulted in the normalisation of taxi operations in a number of warring association members. There have also been a number of successful arrests. We still face problems of successful convictions after these arrests. This can be attributed to people being intimidated against being witnesses as well as other witnesses being killed. We will continue to innovatively seek ways and means to sustain peace in the taxi industry.
During the past financial year, our province witnessed a number of massacres and political assassinations in our communities, but we have also witnessed police successes in dealing with these. In some instances families have been altogether wiped out and councillors killed. We commend the good work of the police in successfully apprehending the perpetrators of these crimes.
The Justice Crime Prevention and Security Cluster ( JCPS)
Madame Speaker, KwaZulu-Natal must be commended for reversing its history of unbridled violence and mayhem. The Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster (JCPS), which is made up of the Criminal Justice departments and our social sector partners, is a very effective governance mechanism for delivering integrated services to our people whilst providing an open platform for dialogue with departments from various levels of government in an effort to close the blockages in the Criminal Justice System and civil society. JCPS Cluster in KwaZulu-Natal has reached an unprecedented level of cooperation. This was witnessed both during the mega event of the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the Public Service strike.
Community Policing and peace-building in communities
Madame Speaker, it is this department’s constitutional obligation to ensure that communities and the police have excellent relations and they work together to defeat criminals. Chapter 11, section 206 of the Constitution is very clear on this provision.Our CPF’s and other community structures should play a leading role in the
promotion of peace, democracy and social cohesion. As we embark on peacebuilding
missions, we have come to realise that our Community Policing Fora are not as effective as they should and can be. Although over the years, these structures have been the beneficiaries of much training and support from our department, they continue to have a high turnover in membership.
They are also prone to manipulation by interest groups with no strong motivation for community safety. They still continue to be very disorganised in their methods of operation and administration. This, Honourable members we are addressing as we embark on a drive to reconstitute CPF’s and training them to perform their functions optimally through our Thathulwazi programme.
As we approach 2011/12 financial year, we will continue with our programme of rebuilding these Community Policing Structures where they have been defunct. Where they are weak, we will take steps to rebuild and strengthen them. Moving forward we will form partnerships with the existing neighbourhood watches, community and street patrols that have voluntarily set themselves up as crime fighters. As government, we have not harnessed this resource for the benefits of our crime fighting endeavour. Beginning this year, we will work with them, sharpen their efforts, and use our authority to assist them master their financial resource sourcing.
To that end, this department will host a summit on community safety structures as a way of analysing what community patrols or community policing formations exist, how effective or ineffective they are, and work towards coordinating them for maximum integration and impact in ridding our streets, our neighbourhoods, our communities at large of crime. This
should also prepare the way for us to give an authoritative input into the development of national policy guidelines for Community Safety Forums (CSF’s) and Community Police Forums (CPF’s), as part of the national policy review process for the safety and security sector.
Positioning our organisational structure for effective crime fighting
The department has embarked on a departmental review of the structure of our organisation in terms of our Human Resources. We want to enhance our ability to meet the crime fighting needs of our communities. Some of the ideas that have emerged, are those of positioning ourselves in districts so as to be able to deliver in crime fighting, working together with District and Local Municipalities. Within that paradigm, we will render to communities the following services:- building crime fighting structures,
- eeceiving and attending to complaints,
- evaluating and monitoring the functioning of the police stations and the police,
- attending to communities in conflict through our Communities in Dialogue Programme
- rendering Social Crime Prevention Programmes through Operation Khuz’umhlola.
Honourable members, it is a well known fact that drugs have penetrated our schools, and our communities and are killing our youth. Experience has shown that poverty and unemployment provide fertile ground for social ills like drug addiction, alcoholism and criminality to find expression. By and large greed drives the wealthy drug lords to capitalise on this condition by luring our youth to be agents of this social ill.
Ironically, often the drug lords escape the criminal justice system by remaining unidentifiable whilst the youth bears the brunt of this crime. It is on this basis that, we believe an integrated approach in the fight against crime must be intertwined with the President’s call to fight against joblessness. This in turn will enable society to tackle poverty, starvation and substance abuse, especially amongst our youth, whilst hitting hard on the source of drug peddlers. Our department will in the forthcoming year work with youth formations to create a crime fighting programme targeting our youth and driven by them.
2011 Local Government Election
The department will continue to plan for successful local government elections in the province. In an effort of promoting peace, democracy and social cohesion the Provincial Government, led by the Premier, staged an important summit that featured political leaders from all political parties in the province, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), the Police, as well as the traditional and the religious leaders.The summit participants resolved amongst other things, to reaffirm their commitment to the provisions of the Electoral Code of Conduct; to promote political tolerance, unity, peace, freedom of choice, expression, association, before, during and after elections; to form the multiparty task team aimed at promoting political tolerance and peaceful elections led by the MEC for Transport, Community Safety and Liaison, working with the Mec for Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs as well as the respective heads of these Departments – the IEC, religious leadership, the House of Traditional Leaders, the State Security Agency, the KZN Police Commissioner, and a maximum of two members per political party.
The Multi-Party task team has already commenced its work. The proposed approach to intervention is three pronged, namely, Peace Making, Promotion of Peace, as well as educating people on democracy and good behaviour. The identified areas for this intervention are Estcourt/Mbabazane precinct, Ulundi/ Nongoma precinct, Greytown/Umsinga precinct, Mandeni/Maphumulo precinct and lastly hostels. In addition to these areas, any proactive measures with regards to any area, where imminent action is required will be attended to by this task team.
The Department of Community Safety and Liaison will provide election monitors in critical voting stations and critical areas. The Police have, as expected committed themselves to vigorous policing before, during and after elections. The Justice Department has also pledged to provide dedicated courts and election monitoring. The IEC have also undertaken to organise the strictest monitoring of the elections, as well as to take drastic action against those who will break the law or breach the code of conduct. These are all efforts aimed at ensuring that elections are free and fair. We remain convinced that KwaZulu-Natal will host successful Local Government Elections.
Conclusion
Honourable members, crime can only be reduced through our coordinated and collective efforts. Many thanks go to the thousands of our police, community policing structures, individuals and all formations who have uniquely and selflessly supported our province in promoting community safety and crime fighting. At this stage, I would like to single out Operation Juluka Tsotsi, the community patrol from Chesterville, for its work in the fight against crime.The community patrol group located in Empangeni is another success story in the province. These are success stories from which, we will model the roll out of our cooperation with community based policing groups throughout the province. It is community structures like these, that give us hope that we can win the war against crime. As the Department of Community Safety and Liaison we will continue to work with and support all Community Policing Fora in the fight against crime.
We wish to thank the many District and Local Municipalities and their leadership for including Safety Plans into their IDPs and for involving us in their efforts to generate crime prevention programmes. We have received immense support and cooperation in our community outreach programmes and we look forward to your continued partnership in driving the United Front Against Crime.
We say to the people of our province, the onus is on each and every one of us to stand up and play a genuine and sincere role in making our homes and streets safe. This task begins with the elected representatives. In this forthcoming year we will want to know if in the areas they live in, they are part of the formation of Community Policing Structures. If they are not it will mean, we have a problem on our hands in fighting crime. As new Councils come in, we will work with them to ensure that each Councillor is involved in the building of crime fighting community structures in their areas.
Police, cannot win the war against crime on their own. The demand for the delivery of the department’s crime-prevention and crime fighting programmes throughout communities
in the province will continue to spur us on in the coming financial year and
beyond, to work tirelessly and harder for our people.
As a nation, we have to remind ourselves that we have only recently - since achieving democracy - embarked on the important journey of realisation of what human security really entails: that it is focused on the safety of individuals and communities rather than on the security of the State as it had been in the past. We will therefore ensure that we work very closely with the people so that communities can have direct access to our services in the true spirit of an integrated, people driven and people centred approach.
As 2011 is the year of People’s Action Against Crime, I challenge all of us to actively play a role in crime prevention and crime fighting strategies so that in the words of INkosi Albert Luthuli, “our today is better than our yesterday and our tomorrow better than our today ”. If we fail to play this role, we must never blame the police and others when we encounter crime.
Finally, Madame Speaker, it is my privilege to table the budget of the Department of Community Safety and Liaison for the 2011/2012 financial year amounting to R150 139 000 million for approval to be appropriated as follows:
Programme 1: Administration (R41 080 000) million
Programme 2: Civilian Oversight (R20 276 000) million
Program 3: Crime Prevention And Community Police Relations (R88 783 000) million
I thank you.
