Oxygen must be closed for criminals, their breath should be limited, the Minister of Police, Mr Fikile Mbalula, told Members of the National Assembly (NA) yesterday when he delivered the 2017/18 Budget Vote of the Police Department at Parliament.
He said crime can never be reformed but it should be fought against and be defeated. “We need to close the oxygen for criminals. Their breath should be limited. Their conception of life should be reduced to the ordinary. Their contemplation of reality should be reduced into nothing. This is our war cry against criminals and criminality in the Republic of South Africa,” emphasised Mr Mbalula.
Recently, South Africa has, according to Mr Mbalula, been engulfed by a new scourge and wave of lawlessness. “Criminals are running amok in this country terrorising our people. We must declare war against crime. We must declare crime as domestic terrorism. In this regard, when I went around Gauteng and the entire country I had listened with great concern to the excruciating cries of our ordinary South Africans. Criminals are brutalising our society with impunity,” he said.
He said the situation is unacceptable and he calls on all the people to respond equally to the fight that criminals are taking out to them. “As the Ministry of Police, we want the country and the world to know that we are declaring war against criminals and criminality. It is in this same spirit that we table this Budget Vote to you today as an integral part of our sustained war against crime.”
Mr Mbalula said as they move forward they want to disarm South Africa. “We must to silence the guns by 2063. In doing so, we have developed a tailored programme for the recovery of stolen and state-owned firearms. Parallel to this programme is the recovery of the stolen and robbed vehicles of the police, including the brutal killing of the police. This will not be successful if we lack the necessary skills in detective services. We are determined, more than ever before, to look acutely in the areas of crime detection success rates, counter-intelligence and the reinforcement of informers.”
He said street committees are very important in the fight against crime. “We are realistic that we cannot win the fight against crime without the involvement of civil society. The Ministry is in the process of reviewing the Community Police Forum Policy. This will ensure that we build strategic partnerships with the communities in our effort to push back the frontiers of criminality,” he said.
According to Mr Mbalula, the South African Police Services (SAPS) has been allocated a budget of R87bn for the 2017/18 financial year, which includes a transfer to the Civilian Secretariat for Police Service of R124.7m.
He said in 2017 SAPS announced the Back-to-Basics approach to policing. “In order to intensify this approach, the organisational structure was reviewed which resulted in the establishment of the management interventions function headed by a Deputy National Commissioner.”
He said the Back-to-Basics approach to policing is primarily benefiting the Visible Policing and Detective Services programmes, which are the department’s core service delivery programmes.
“These two programmes constitute of R62bn, or 71.3% of the total budget for this financial year – with a combined personnel count of 140 657 in 2016/17. The expected outcomes of the Back-to-Basics approach is improved departmental performance on the prevention, detection and investigation of crime,” said Mr Mbalula.
He said SAPS is developing a plan to expand public order policing to support the implementation of the recommendations of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry. “Allocations of R242m in 2017/18 and R355.8m in 2018/19 were approved by Cabinet in the 2016 budget for this purpose. This explains the projected increase of 7.9% over the medium term in expenditure in the Specialised Interventions sub-programme in the Visible Policing programme,” he said.
Supporting the Budget Vote of the South African Police Service (SAPS), the Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Police, Mr Francois Beukman, told Members of the NA that the Committee received briefings from SAPS on their 2017/18 budget performance plan. He said briefings were received from the Independent Police Investigation Directorate (IPID) and the Civilian Secretariat for the Police Service.
He said in those briefings the Committee focused on, among other things, the professionalisation and demilitarisation of the police, ethical leadership and the importance of technology in the fight against crime. He said the Committee recommends that “the policing model should make provision for equity of policing services in urban and deep rural areas. This includes a clear provision of police resources to historically disadvantaged areas – and areas which have disproportionally high crime rates”.
He told the NA MPs the Committee highlighted during last year’s Budget Vote debate the importance of leadership at police stations and cluster levels of policing. “We want to underscore this one again. We need a more hands-on approach with non-performing police stations and units as the primary focus. Turnaround times for dealing with station management failures and dealing with resource allocation challenges to units should improve drastically.”
By Mava Lukani
24 May 2017
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