Speech by Dianne Kohler Barnard MP, Democratic Alliance shadow minister of police, in the budget debate 24: safety and security, July 1 2009

Mr Chairman - we can't go on like this. We cannot go on as a nation listening to Nancy Richards of SAfm telling of a woman who gave birth a month ago as a result of rape, only to be dragged from her home last week and gang raped, only to run in terror searching for a Good Samaritan, and finding one who dried her tears, calmed her, gave her water, and who then dragged her into the bush where she was raped again.

Mr Chairman everyone in this chamber is fully cognisant of the crime in South Africa - we are not a nation of children looking for a Nanny State to tell us only as much as it thinks we should be allowed to hear. I confess that the new Minister's decision to renege on his predecessor's assertion that crime statistics would be released twice annually, startled even me. The Minister in fact told me on a televised discussion that if he had his way we would only be informed of the status of crime once every second year.

Now we have to wait until September before he releases the statistics which will by then be 18 months out of date. Hardly a reflection on the cold hard reality of crime we are experiencing today.

It's understandable that the ANC wanted to keep the country in the dark in relation to the statistics before the election - that would hardly have improved their failed attempt at reaching a two-thirds majority, but to wait until September is utterly unacceptable.  Without statistics, without the knowledge of the criminal mind that they give us, we have taken the fight against crime back into the dark ages.

Two years ago I knew with certainty that fifty-two of us were being murdered every day, 365 days a year.  Today I have no idea - is it 60 a day - 100 perhaps?  You are well protected by your bodyguards Minister, as are your Cabinet colleagues, and a million a month is spent on protecting the President, but the rest of the citizens of South Africa have an absolute right to know just how bad the situation is, where the worst crimes are perpetrated, and to be informed to the nth degree so that they may make every attempt to protect themselves and their families - because it certainly is the case that the SAPS is unable to do it for them.

Every expert in the country will tell you that updated and accurate information on crime is an essential tool in fighting crime and creating real and localised responses. Covering up crime won't make crime go away, and Minister - no one asked you to protect us from the truth.

What we need are crime statistics updated continuously, using a real-time crime information system. Information that is available to any member of the public via a real-time internet crime database visible at their local police station, which would allow for detailed data analysis. Weekly reports generated by the system could be used by the SAPS to develop specific responses to localised problems, and the database should be integrated with statistics generated by the Departments of Justice and Correctional Services.

Sadly from the world without bodyguards, the truth is that we spend every last cent at our disposal on people other than the police to keep our families safe, paying 40-billion-rand a year for something our taxes should already provide.  The reason? On the streets there are great swathes of citizens who no longer trust a man or a woman in uniform.

I know the government understands this because 18 national departments spent a total of R431.2 million on private security a year ago - so they don't trust them either.

What we do know that there were over 6 000 complaints against members of the SAPS this past year... 2772 of those for criminal activities - that equals eight police doing crime each and every day. In addition, to date R90m has been spent on suspended SAPS members on full pay, covering nearly 13-thousand working days in total; we know that there are police stations that are in a pitiful state of repair, and we know that minutes after the SAPS top structure informed us here in Parliament a week ago that there were no more equipment shortages, that SAPS members were inundating us with tales of how it was that they had no equipment at all.

What I do know is that the latest Global Peace Index survey placed South Africa 123 out of 144 countries - seven places down on our position last year. Clearly the ongoing deterioration of the crime problem in South Africa warrants a decisive new approach. 

Having a look at what we spend just some of this R46-billion budget on, there are the enormously expensive 10111 call-centres, R600-million in Gauteng alone, that we call in vain, for no-one to come. Having completed the report we requested, the Auditor General stated that there are serious inadequacies in the provision of the most basic of police services. 79% of the calls made to the 10111 centres are abandoned - two of those were mine, two of those were my deputy's. We're still waiting for someone to respond from the SAPS.

To a certain extent, Minister, you are following in your predecessor's shoes.

He attempted to hide the truth from us, as you're hiding the statistics from us.  He hid away the damning 400-page R7.5-million report of the dysfunctionality of the police Legal Services Division - run by a woman who, the report claims, has "a fundamental misunderstanding" of the law and legal processes.  It is under this Lindiwe Mthimkulu's leadership that the SAPS ran up legal bills of R46-m in 2006/7 - twice the amount paid out in settlements for that year.

Yet another result of the ANC's failed cadre deployment policy, and one which this country is praying will not land us with another dysfunctional National Police Commissioner.  Just a suggestion here Minister - why not hire someone who is actually qualified to do the job?

Certainly some of the budget will go to The New Unit. Now I understand completely that the ANC had no option but to go ahead and destroy the most successful crime fighting unit this country has ever known - the Scorpions with their 94% conviction rate - because of the numbers of ANC bigwigs and parliamentarians who ended up in court because of them.

So now we have DIPCI tucked safely away under the Minister's arm and we have no one left to police the police, let alone investigate the next Jackie Selebi, or Tony Yengeni.

The morale of our SAPS members is at an all-time low as they hear of the cases against their rudderless colleagues who have been convicted of murder, armed robbery and rape, while they're stuck behind desks pushing papers aimed at criminalising the honest firearm owners in our society via that legislation the court has now inevitably put on ice awaiting the results of a Constitutional Court Challenge.

The Democratic Alliance said the Firearm Legislation would be an extremely expensive failure, and it has.

Legal gun owners fumed at the hoops they had to jump through to get a new, improved, expensive gun licence when they already owned one, while at the same time one clue as to how our criminals have become so heavily armed comes via the information that Police somehow ‘lost' 2 507 weapons last year, and that added to municipal losses, means that 3 767 weapons are now in the hands of the criminals. In fact since 2001, over 14-thousand weapons have been lost or stolen from police stations, and so of course they chose to turn and focus on the rest of us...

And if, in the unlikely event that the criminals are caught - that's an 11% chance if they murder someone, an 8% chance if they rob a house, and a 7% chance if they steal a car - they'll have a long holiday out on bail because the Forensic Science Laboratories are still in chaos. Even though in the latest data from the Minister of Police he admits that backlogs in Forensic Science Laboratories are up by a staggering 93.8% since June 2007, we have been extremely reliably informed that these figures significantly understate the reality of the situation - and that total backlogs are in fact roughly double what the Minister has claimed.

The backlogs in the Western Cape alone stand at approximately 18,000 samples, while the Minister claims that the backlog countrywide stands at 11,758.

Another query for the Minister, would be why it is that so few police are able to write dockets correctly when we spend so much on training, and why it is that there are 5 200 SAPS members, as revealed in the SCOPA hearing two hours ago, who do not have driver's licences? The docket situation may not be so serious in that they're often lost anyway -- the number of lost dockets has increased every year since 2003, and totals over 2 500.

But seriously, a SAPS member who can't drive?

That brings me to statements made by the new Deputy Minister of Police, Fikile Mbalula, who believes that unemployed youths, armed with torches, should be sent out to patrol the streets with a public relations certificate for protection.

At present, the Police Service remains hamstrung by the poor quality of its training programmes, and most new recruits never come close to reaching their full potential as officers because they never receive the kind of tuition and guidance they deserve. Though sorting out the myriad existing problems inside the SAPS may be less glamorous than announcing flashy new programmes, this should be where the Deputy Minister's focus lies. There really is no need to proffer teenagers as cannon fodder.

One of the most worrying aspects of this budget is the fact that it has to meet the extraordinary amounts to be paid out to civilians who were abused by the police. The truth is that there are police in SA today are convicted of murder, rape, GBH, assault - and of course beating ill pensioners to death in the cells, putting women in male cells to be gang raped, or throwing innocent men - like the game ranger who left the buck transport licence on his desk - into a cell to be gang raped all night while the officer slept at the front desk.

Almost one fifth of the budget was lost to these totally preventable errors of judgement on the part of our police.  Why are we failing in our training?

We're all watching as scores of new recruits are taken into the SAPS - and such is the psychometric testing that a gang of these new students near Port Elizabeth used their vehicle to ram a car off the road, and proceeded to pillage the broken civilians lying scattered around their wreck. The latest AG report reveals that SAPS members hardly receive training anyway.

How is that possible, and are we actually paying for the sort of training centres that allow people like this into the service?

Another of the areas of concern is the fact that the Ministry has failed to reverse Jackie Selebi's disastrous destruction of the specialised units.

That would be the totally discredited National Police Commissioner who has been on full pay for nearly two years, and whose contract has just been extended so that he'll receive yet another R93 000 for July - and then what Minister, be reinstated? We don't need dithering here - just a clear explanation of why you've kept him on for another month past the expiration of his contract, on top of paying him nearly R2-million to sit at home.

A top priority should be to appoint a new Commissioner, as well to fill various vacancies in senior posts that hinder the department's ability to function. Currently two Deputy Commissioner positions stand vacant and two Divisional Commissioners face criminal charges. New appointees should be security specialists and their appointments must be based on merit, not quotas or political motivations, but the question is, will they?

It was Selebi who decided to close down all specialised units, such as the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences units - and all the others which had been crafted into lean, delivering units equal to the best in the world.  Did the Ministry perhaps not join the dots when it watched the inability of SAPS to deal with the outbreak of the truly horrific xenophobic attacks - and realise that that inability was directly linked to the closure of the specialised crowd control units?

So now that expertise is scattered and no longer utilised. Indeed, if we actually had viable crime statistics in front of us to scrutinise, we'd be able to determine for ourselves the results of this decision.

I use the word ‘viable' because of the endless reports I've received over the years that stations are understating crime statistics so that they may receive a pat on the back from their superiors. Ask the country's new Community Safety Minister in the Western Cape, Lennit Max. You can't keep the statistics from the DA in this province any more, so that can of worms is now well and truly open, and the news is out that at least 500 crimes in this province may not have been investigated, with 56 rapes not registered.

Now that you've shut down the Scorpions, the only unit left that could investigate Police corruption would be the Independent Complaints Directorate. Unfortunately when the ICD investigates, the SAPS mostly ignores its suggestions.  

This House has a moral obligation to strengthen the Independent Complaints Directorate which has been very deliberately been kept under-resourced. A week ago the Minister stated on television that he was strengthening this unit, but the ICD promptly came before the portfolio committee and revealed that R3-million had been summarily subtracted from their budget. Who are we supposed to believe here - the ICD and the Treasury or the Minister?

The fact that there is no separate budget debate for the Independent Complaints Directorate here today says it all.

As an interim measure I have submitted a Private Members Legislative Proposal, the purpose of which is to empower the ICD by forcing the SAPS to enact any recommendation the ICD might make to it, concerning the conduct of its members. It will be most interesting to see the attitude of the Ministry towards this legislation, especially in the light of the revelations by provincial heads of the ICD that every one of them was currently investigating reports of torture by members of the SAPS. In fact deaths at the hands of the police or in custody have shown a significant increase for the second year in a row.

Just yesterday I was contacted by a man whose son was, according to an ICD report, shot dead by a SAPS member. That was nine years ago, and the member is still on active duty, and the evidence has disappeared piece by piece.

Minister, you might want to speak with the Minister of Home Affairs if you're unaware of the implications of not having secure borders, and read the Auditor General's report which states that under your Ministry the borders are irrelevant. The 2008 World Drug Report, released annually by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to review critical developments in the narcotics trade, paints a damning picture of South Africa's drug problem.  We are one of the few countries in the world that produces cannabis for export; we are one of the few non-coca producing countries in the world that have cocaine-producing laboratories; and we produce 28% of all of the cannabis produced in Africa.

The solution? The government must reinstate the specialist SAPS Narcotics Bureau which was disbanded during the many waves of SAPS restructuring. And of course illegal narcotics must be prevented from entering and exiting our country through increased border and port-of-entry security. According to the Auditor-General's assessment of our borderline security, our land borders are under-capacitated by 71%, our sea borders by 96%, and our air borders have no permanent staff at all. Your answer was to cut the border budget by 3.23%. Minister give the borders back to the SANDF where they belong.

In closing I must thank, from the bottom of my heart, those brave men and women of SAPS who work tirelessly to keep us safe. They do a spectacular job despite an almost total vacuum in leadership. What is sad, is that when they retire, they will probably be denied their pensions for up to three full years, or have their pensions illegally deducted as part of sick-leave. They will in all likelihood have their homes and their possessions attached.  Currently over 2 000 ex-SAPS members are in this predicament.  That's how we treat our police in this country.

Is there anything new in this budget - apart from the fact that the second largest increase goes to protection services for the so-called VIPs, and not to visible policing to protect the citizens...the answer is, sadly, no.

Do you imagine that the Democratic Alliance is going to support this budget?

Source: Democratic Alliance

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