Let me first take this opportunity to greet you all and wish you a happy, safe and prosperous 2010. This is our first meeting this year and I hope we are going to have a lot of recapping from last year’s activities in order to ensure smooth implementation of all the plans that we had for this year.
Before I proceed with my opening remarks, I would like to express our sincere gratitude on behalf of the Department of Safety and Liaison for your support at the 2010 Safety and Security summit. I hope we will continue to work together to ensure completion and adoption of our 2010 safety and security plan, which we are expected to present at the provincial government 2010 Summit early this year.
In addition to this plan, we still have more outstanding issues, which are of strategic importance, especially this year and they include:
* Consolidation of all the 2010 related plans
* Our mass mobilisation plan and safety plans for the public viewing areas in various districts, taking to account the ever increasing number of these areas
* Our strategy in dealing with human trafficking cases
* Implementation plan for “Operation Clean Up on Street Children”
* Our final cluster Programme of Action
* Memoranda of understanding between various departments as part of our comprehensive response to safety of tourists and foreign nationals, school safety, stock theft, rural safety and 2010 safety plan
* Cluster communication strategy
* Our support to local government, especially with regard to the establishment of community safety forums.
This means our session today needs to put the above matters to rest so that we can be able to move with great speed in the implementation of our plans. I do not think you need to be reminded of the fact that 2010 is a seminal year for the country. Our security plans and readiness for the 2010 FIFA World Cup will be under extreme scrutiny and we need to accelerate our pace, especially on the tournament-related activities.
Our guiding principle is to ensure that we:
* extend an unforgettable South African welcome to the world
* mobilise the people of the Eastern Cape to be part of this African world cup
* strengthen collaboration amongst various stakeholders
Our 2010 transport master plan has been completed and it clearly requires various stakeholders to identify areas of collaboration, especially from a security point of view, in order to ensure successful implementation. As this cluster, we have more responsibilities this year as we all know that this month the Minister of Police re-opened the fire arms amnesty in an effort to reduce the number of firearms in circulation to combat violent crime.
As we are preparing for the 2010 Safety and Security Month (February), we need to work together to raise awareness about this and communicate our themes: “Together we can do more against crime”, “Awulethe Umshini Wakho, Surrender your firearm”. Our communication team needs to help us on this.
We have finally recruited more than 600 safety patrollers from community police forums (CPF) structures, who will be screened to ensure security clearance, receive training from Safety and Security Sector Education and Training Authority (SASSETA) and be deployed in the public viewing areas in various districts. The training will commence next month and we are going to visit the training sites as part of our Safety and Security Month programme.
The remaining challenge is the ever-increasing number of public viewing areas, which are the responsibility of municipalities. If we are not prudent enough, our lack of decisiveness, especially at local government level has a potential to frustrate our transport and security plans.
At some point, we knew that we had a Fan Park in Nelson Mandela Bay and public viewing areas in Buffalo City, Makana, Matatiele, Cofimvaba, Lady Grey and Port St Johns. As we speak, we have 11 public viewing areas and our law enforcement agencies are expected to develop new plans and deploy the already limited resources to those areas.
There is an urgent need to close this identification of public viewing areas and focus on popularising the already identified venues and ensure that we have proper crowd control measures. We need to start getting progress reports with regard to the roles of various department in our 2010 plans, including the Department of Health, Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and Department of Local Government as we all know that this is: “The Year of Working Together to Speed Up Effective Service Delivery to the People”, which includes amongst others hands on support to local government.
As we move closer to the tournament, we need to intensify our interaction with the host city in order to ensure that everything goes according to our over arching provincial plan that we have adopted.
On that note, I would like to declare the meeting open!
Issued by: Department of Roads and Transport, Eastern Cape Provincial Government
26 January 2010
