OPINION | Under Bheki Cele's oversight, South Africa is undoubtedly more lawless and violent, and the SAPS is undoubtedly less capable than ever of turning the tide, argues geordinhl.
Under Bheki Cele's oversight, South Africa is undoubtedly more lawless and violent, and the SAPS is undoubtedly less capable than ever of turning the tide, argues President Cyril Ramaphosa's stubborn refusal to shuffle Police Minister Bheki Cele out of his cabinet despite five years of failure, a steady march in the wrong direction of all our significant crime numbers, and a troubling exodus of SAPS officers in recent years is an indictment on his Presidency.
No one in the real world – away from state-funded Ministerial security estates and blue-light convoys – shares this confidence. The crime stats for the third quarter of last year, as presented by Cele in February, show that a staggering 7555 people were murdered over those three months. More than 12,000 rapes were reported during this period. That's not the story of a country, or a Minister, winning the war.
In defending Cele, President Ramaphosa said that the Minister had raised the issue of under-resourced SAPS stations and the skewed ratio between police officers and citizens. He claimed that when Cele had done so, the"penny dropped". But how can it be that this penny only dropped in 2023? This problem has been decades in the making and has been the subject of an entire Commission of Inquiry in Khayelitsha.
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