Minister of Police shows contempt for Parliamentary processes

17 November 2023

A meeting of the Select Committee on petitions and executive undertakings had to be postponed yesterday morning due to the fact that the Minister of Police, Bheki Cele, and his Deputy were AWOL and did not even have the courtesy to give a timeous apology.

The Committee had scheduled a meeting to scrutinise executive undertakings which were made to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) by Minister Cele during a questions session on 30 May 2023.

Some of the undertakings by the Minister included:

Budgeting R65 Million for allocation to provinces to address murder and other contact crimes in top 30 high crime stations;

Training and deployment of specialised teams to track and apprehend wanted suspects;

Adding 2808 new police trainees to capacitate detective services in SAPS;

Re-instatement of former experienced SAPS members to capacitate detective services; and

Allocating R1 billion to build more police stations and improve the dropped call rates at the 10111 call centres.

Cele has once again shown that he and the ANC government do not care about the citizens of South Africa who are daily subjected to murder, robbery, gender-based violence and other heinous crimes. The fact that he deems a report-back session on the implementation of promises made by himself in Parliament not important enough to attend, proves that he has no respect for parliamentary processes of oversight over the Executive. This is not the first time this minister has shown disdain for Parliament and who it represents.

The cold, harsh reality is that more than 240 000 people have been murdered in South Africa over the past 10 years, more than 140 000 of these during Cele’s tenure as Minister of Police. To contextualise this, during the 20-year long war in Afghanistan, 176 000 people were killed. South Africa has become a bloodbath under the ANC and its incompetent ministers.

The DA calls on all South Africans to register to vote this weekend in order to rid South Africa of Bheki Cele and the ANC that deployed him. A DA government will ensure that one of the first orders of business would be to devolve police functions to competent provincial and local government spheres to allow for proper and effective policing.

Issued by Rikus Badenhorst, DA member of the NCOP, 17 November 2023