It is time to rethink security and policing in South Africa.

On 30 April, a gang of thirteen members with AK47s and R4 assault rifles and pistols entered the tourist mecca of Graskop. They closed all entrances to the town, burgled shops, used explosives to open safes, and terrorized residents by shooting wildly in the streets.

During these events, the local South African Police Service (SAPS) stayed inside the police station and only emerged long afterwards. Angry residents and taxpayers thereafter forced the local police chief to leave and locked access to the station. Only then did about thirty policemen from the Public Order unit and a police general arrive at the scene.

Remarkably, the event was not covered in national TV bulletins and only revealed in the Afrikaans Rapport newspaper on 7 May.

SAPS: low trust, limited capacity

The events at Graskop reflect a broader trend. Already during the riots of July 2021, it became clear that the SAPS was unable to protect many citizens. Citizens from several communities had to mobilize to protect themselves.

Taxpayers and citizens have become all too used to the terrible statistics of more than 80 murders and 130 rapes per day, which surpass the criteria used to indicate a civil war. In many areas, deterrence of violent crime remains weak to non-existent.

There are still some professional elements in the SAPS, but they are clearly unable to significantly change the situation. According to Dr. Johan Burger of the Institute for Security Studies, also a former police major general, the SAPS annual reports indicated that the number of serious robberies and murders being solved dropped by 40% in the past decade. 

A report by Dr. Benjamin Roberts of the the Human Sciences Research Council in 2022 found that already since the late 1990s, annual surveys indicated that less than 50% of citizens trusted the SAPS. This motion of no-confidence and legitimacy deficit was based on widespread perceptions of police failure, corruption and ineffectiveness, as well as experiences of crime and policing.

The centrally-controlled SAPS has lost its monopoly on force in several areas of South Africa, and it will not regain it anytime soon. The factionalized African National Congress (ANC) will remain as unable as during the past decade to turn this situation around soon. One can only imagine how insecure many areas would have been by now without private and community-based security services.

Plural policing in Africa

In a sense, policing in a transformed South Africa has become Africanized. The sociologist Sarah Jane Cooper-Knock of the University of Sheffield has found that across Africa combinations of individuals, groups and firms police the everyday lives and spaces of people.

The idea of “the police” as an instrument of the state’s monopoly of force and the carrier of countrywide legitimacy largely developed in the context of Western nation-states. The dynamics of 54 states and more than 2 000 cultural groups in Africa differ considerably from those Western nation-states.

Those groups often consider themselves as self-sufficient actors, not as minorities. The Congolese academic Patience Kabamba considers those group solidarities as the more powerful building blocks within a political order in Africa, especially given the limited capabilities of most states. The narratives and experiences of (in)security in South Africa differ too.

Pre-colonial Africa, according to the British historian Stephen Ellis, experienced many political orders where the state as such was absent. Those orders largely rested on the settlements between groups and strong actors. This state of affairs is already developing in parts of South Africa.

Vigilantes and ANC partners

Informally, the death sentence has been re-introduced in several areas of South Africa. I recently talked to a sangoma who explained that the police had lost the community’s trust and enjoyed limited authority in many townships. When a serious crime is committed and the suspected perpetrator is caught, a vigilante court will sentence him or burn him alive. By the time the police arrive, it is too late. The long-suffering community is often too happy or too afraid to give information about the vigilantes.

Loren Landau, the co-director of Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab at the University of Johannesburg, has done research on these issues in Mamelodi near Pretoria. He found that the demographic growth has been too vast and that the state’s control and its delivery of services are very deficient. The local ANC therefore has to cooperate with mafia-type protection gangs that act as township associations or taxi and truck federations.

In several areas, the municipal authorities and police have to listen to such actors, rather than the other way around. Vigilante groups have emerged in similar spaces. Some estimates claim that vigilantism already is the fourth largest contributor to murder statistics.  

Plural policing

The circumstances in different regions of South Africa diverge. Historically, since the Union of South Africa, teams of detectives and prosecutors have periodically cooperated to solve complex crimes. At the post-1994 Scorpions (DSO) and its predecessor, the Independent Directorate of Organized Crime (IDOC), state advocates like Willie Viljoen and Gerrie Nel even directed investigative teams. Perhaps political actors in the Western Cape should pursue a joint devolution of powers for both the police and the prosecution service?

However, in several areas of South Africa, communities have been key legal providers of local policing for years. It will take years to build resilient and professional security organizations in the private sector and among communities. The relationship with SAPS will sometimes be complex too.

However, the focus on “the police” as the main protector has failed and even endangers many citizens these days. According to Prof. Bruce Baker, a policing expert at the University of Coventry, the insistence that policing in African states adhere to the European model of a monopoly, mostly merely promotes or allows political abuse.

Multipolar futures

Convincing foreign donors and governments of this reality may take some time. Nevertheless, those foreign diplomats and NGO employees who have lived long enough in the northern and eastern areas of South Africa will know as much about the severe weaknesses of the SAPS as any local citizen. Those who have experience of other African countries will also recognize many of the broad trends.

At present, the ANC will probably refuse to actively recognize the need for plural policing by responsible state and non-state actors. As the Africanist scholar Patrick Chabal stated in Africa Works, political elites may deliberately prefer disorder or abstain from action against criminals if it serves to strengthen their position or to weaken their opponents.

The processes shaping a multipolar order and a weaker state apparatus in South Africa continue to gain strength. Plural and local policing by responsible non-state actors cooperating with the besieged professional elements in the SAPS constitute among the better options. Even then, in too many areas the limits of destructive disorder and a new equilibrium still lie in the future.

Dr. Heinrich Matthee is the honorary chair of security studies at Akademia (Centurion) and a Netherlands-based political analyst for business in the Middle East. This is an updated version of an article that previously appeared in Netwerk24.