Provincial ministers
Provincial commissioner
Senior police staff
Department of Community Safety officials
Guests
Today is the launch of an exiting project in the Western Cape of which I am particularly proud to be a part of. The safety plan project aims to establish cooperative governance at its finest form in engaging all relevant provincial departments in the fight against crime.
It is important to understand that this project is not aimed at developing policing plans. Is must be seen as a safety plan, aimed at making our province a safer place for all. Free from the fear of crime.
This safety project is the result of years of intensive research to establish the definitive needs of our communities. This is done to facilitate more informed planning and better informed communities in our fight against crime. Projects of this nature are not decided on willy-nilly, we are committed to serve the Western Cape in the most effective manner and through comprehensive social research, and we are best able to comply with this mandate.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Many of our citizens wake up every morning burdened with the thought whether he or she will survive the day without becoming just another statistic of crime. This is how fear has become an integral part of the socio economic construct of our society. Fear has embedded itself as a parasite in our communities and we are caught in a vicious circle of vulnerability and fear. Crime is eroding our moral fibre and destroying our human and economic capital.
Currently the Western Cape economy contributes roughly 14.5 percent to South Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and grows at an average of 3.2 percent a year. More sophisticated sectors such as finance, real estate, information communication technology (ICT), retail and tourism have shown substantial growth, and are the main contributors to the regional economy.
Ladies and gentlemen,
As economic times get harder, theft in basic food stuffs, like bread, maize meal and the like has increased dramatically. We know that this is done to feed poor families, but unfortunately whatever the motivation behind it, it remains a criminal offence.
As illustrated above, crime can be largely seen as a spin-off to poverty; hundreds of our people face difficult situations on a daily basis. Steal or go hungry. It is easy for us to say that you must make the correct decisions, but in desperate situations, people do desperate things. This is exactly why it is of critical importance that the safety plan must not be seen as a policing plan. It must involve all government departments to address poverty, unemployment and corruption, in a collective effort to ensure the safety of our people.
If reducing crime does not become our common goal, we will never succeed in winning the fight against crime. As long as there are people, there will be crime. We will never rid our communities of crime, but we can certainly reduce it. Crime is not an inescapable reality. As the provincial government we have to ensure that everyone have food on his or her table, acquire the necessary skills to perform work and thus enabling them to live according to good values and norms.
Our province and country alike is already paying the price for not effectively addressing unemployment and the enormous skills shortage afflicting our people. In giving people an alternative to a life of crime, is a step in the right direction. While valiantly fighting the symptoms of crime, we have to pro actively fight the factors that force our people to commit crime. This fight is not the duty of one department alone; it is the fight of all provincial and national departments as crime has a large knock-on effect to all spheres of public life.
Ladies and gentlemen,
There will always be many constraints to any crime fighting strategy. Somebody once said: the road to success is always under construction. One would like to say that we must change human behaviour to bring about the qualitative improvement of their situation, but this is nearly impossible. Changing those who are entrenched in crime and showing them an alternative to crime, is a huge challenge, but will with the help of all role players is certainly not impossible.
This educational venture on making our communities safer will always have to be a committed one and be sustained through all the agents of change, whether it is the government, the media, schools and churches. The merit of many plans lies in its sustainability. The notion of something is often romantic, but the reality is something quite different. Too often you see programs rolled out with much fanfare, just to fizzle out a few moths later. But today I pledge my support and commitment to the Safety Plan, to see it through and have it attain what it promises to: to create safer places in our province.
Ladies and gentlemen, we must actively prevent crime, instead of just fighting crime. The launch of the safety plan project is a milestone in the Western Cape. It exemplifies co-operative governance and in working together towards creating safer places, I have every confidence that this project will be a great success.
Henry Buckle once said that “Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it”. Let us use this opportunity to create a society in which we make crime an unacceptable alternative.
Thank you
Enquiries:
Julian Jansen
Tel: 021 483 3873
Fax: 021 483 3874
Fax to e-mail: 086 5794 315
Cell: 082 726 9334
