SA’s Group of Twenty (G20) handover in November — not to “an empty chair” as President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly worried, but a chair seating US President Donald Trump — seems the one concrete takeaway from their White House meeting.
The cabinet subsequently said it looked forward to “the possible attendance of president Trump to [sic] the G20 leaders summit”. What will happen on the economic front remains to be seen; their meeting has not yet led to any agreements.
Even less visible is any movement on crime, which was central to the Trump administration’s false articulations on the nonexistent white genocide in SA, and was the showpiece of the Oval Office ambush that stumped Ramaphosa with those white crosses, which turned out to be a 2020 protest and not real graves, as Trump claimed.
Even so, the fact remains that SA’s murder rate is among the highest in the world. According to the official crime statistics, 27,621 people were murdered between April 1 2023 and March 31 2024. Between January and March this year 5,727 people were murdered.
Ramaphosa has blamed poverty and unemployment, but countries with similar or lower per capita income than SA disprove this argument. Living in slums from Kibera in Nairobi to Lagos’s Makoko ghetto on stilts, Neza in Mexico City and Mumbai’s Dharavi is just as brutal and dehumanising, but murder rates are generally much lower than SA’s.
So, while poverty, unemployment and inequality cannot be discounted as factors, they alone do not explain the extent, and importantly the deadly brutality, of violent crime in SA. The focus must surely fall on the culture of impunity that shields officials, politicians and others, regardless of wrongdoing or incompetence.
The SA Police Service (SAPS) and State Security Agency (SSA) have been central in the doctrinal shift to state security and away from human security in SA. Crucially, the SA constitution and the bill of rights demand safety for people, including freedom “from all forms of violence from either public or private sources”.
The SSA’s incompetence was illustrated — yet again — by its failure to brief Ramaphosa on the white crosses protest. Little seems to have changed since the July 2021 civic unrest, when intelligence was found sorely lacking.
The SAPS includes “stamping the authority of the state” as a performance indicator. Operation Shanela, a cordon and seizure show of force, has led to a number of arrests and some confiscation of drugs, stolen goods and illegal firearms, but does little to prevent crime.
That police are generally regarded by South Africans as corrupt and ineffective emerges from both opinion surveys and the SAPS’s own research. Only one in three SAPS officers believe police do not abuse their powers, according to the SAPS’s own 2022/23 annual report. The 2024 national security strategy remains unpublished and secret.
Therein lies the rub. The SAPS has resisted meaningful reform since the 2012 National Development Plan (NDP), which recommended demilitarisation, a policing board for senior appointments and a competitive selection process for the national police commissioner, alongside separating job and rank so a clueless general can’t trump the subject expertise of, say, a forensics sergeant.
The expert panel established after the August 2012 Marikana massacre, when police killed 34 striking Lonmin miners,
re-emphasised the NDP’s recommendations. It took the police ministry 33 months to release the report after its submission in July 2018.
Multipronged, co-ordinated tactics were tried before, and failed. As long as the focus falls on the security and authority of the state — rather than people’s safety — crime and its social devastation will remain unchanged.
• Merten is a veteran political journalist specialising in parliament and governance.
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