A DA government will halve violent crime in Gauteng – John Steenhuisen

27 January 2024

Fellow South Africans,

The people of Gauteng live in existential dread of violent crime.

Over the past three years, the murder rate has increased by 40% in this province.

Every single day, 75 South Africans are brutally killed in this country.

The epidemic of violent crime is particularly devastating for the most innocent victims.

Women, girls and young children suffer unspeakable crimes in a country with one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world.

These aren’t just statistics to me.

Many of you may not know this, but I am the only man in my household.

I have a wife and three beautiful daughters.

Like all of you who are blessed enough to be parents, I love them to the ends of the earth.

Like you, I am horrified by the gruesome cases of GBV that we are exposed to every day.

It is every parent’s biggest nightmare to get a phone call to find out that your daughter, or son, has been raped or killed.

And yet, it is a nightmare that hundreds of thousands of South Africans live through every year.

Over 41,000 women are raped in this country every year.

Interpol has even named South Africa the “rape capital of the world.”

Over 27,000 people are murdered every year.

This means more innocent people are killed on the streets of South Africa every year than in many warzones around the world.

Here in Soshanguve, you don’t need me to tell you about the cost of violent crime.

The people of Soshanguve are subjected to this living hell on a daily basis.

And what has the ANC done about it?

Instead of ending cadre deployment into the police, instead of fixing the DNA backlog, instead of ensuring that SAPS stops smuggling guns to gangsters, what did Panyaza Lesufi do?

He took your tax money to buy ill-fitting PEP Stores uniforms for untrained cadres and pretended that they were “crime wardens.”

We have already seen cases where these amaPanyaza themselves turned out to be criminals!

What kind of person pulls a drunkard out of a shebeen, gives him a uniform and a weapon, and then unleashes them onto a community?

Mark my words: it will not be long until we find out that the ANC’s so-called crime wardens are themselves the source of crime.

Instead of making our streets safer, they have made our streets more dangerous.

But the funny thing is that, in his desperation to look like he’s doing something about crime, Lefusi has actually confirmed something that the DA has been saying for a long time.

For years, we have been fighting to devolve policing powers away from national government to the local level.

This is because we believe that we can best fight crime if police officers know the communities they work in.

For years, Police Minister Bheki Cele has tried to prevent the DA from doing this in places where we govern.

And then along comes that Lesufi with his wardens and confirms that it is time to devolve policing to local and provincial governments!

He has inadvertently done the DA a big favour.

Because next year when we take over government in Gauteng, the DA will use the precedent created by Lesufi to replace his useless crime wardens with a fully-fledged Gauteng police force that will keep you safe!

This is not an empty promise, because we are already doing it where we govern in the Western Cape.

In the Western Cape, the DA has created the Law Enforcement Advancement Project, or LEAP.

Unlike Lesufi’s untrained vigilantes, the DA has trained over 1,200 highly-skilled officers who have helped to reduce murder by up to 40% in some of the most dangerous neighbourhoods.

When we talk about the DA difference, this is what we mean.

On the one side, you have Lesufi’s toy soldiers in their PEP Stores outfits posing a threat to the community.

On the other side, you have the DA’s skilled LEAP officers keeping communities safe.

But the DA difference doesn’t end there.

Unlike the uncaring ANC, we will not allow women and girls to be re-traumatised when they report GBV cases.

We will train and equip all police stations and health centres to provide appropriate care to victims, with empathy and compassion.

We will focus like a laser beam on these grotesque crimes against women and children to ensure GBV is wiped out of our communities.

We will fix forensic laboratories and clear the backlog of DNA analysis, to ensure that we put criminals behind bars.

And the DA will abolish cadre deployment, which is itself a crime committed by the ANC against the people.

Through cadre deployment, the ANC has given important positions in the police to their cadres, many of whom cannot even write down a statement or use a gun properly.

The DA will replace cadre deployment with merit-based appointments at SAPA, to ensure that only the best among us have the honour of becoming police officers who protect our communities.

In as little as four months from now, the people of Gauteng have the opportunity to elect the DA into government to rescue you from crime.

These are not just empty words.

Where the DA governs, we have the evidence that shows how we already started to make people safer.

That is why I am here today to make a solemn pledge to you.

If the people of Soshanguve help elect the DA into government here in Gauteng and nationally, we will halve violent crime in this province within a single term in office!

For too long, we have been forced to live in fear.

For too long, we have been forced to lock our families away from violent thugs.

We can change all of that by voting the DA into government here in Gauteng.

In this election, the stakes are too high to stay at home.

If we don’t replace the ANC with the DA now, violent crime will consume all of us.

Did you know that, since 1994, over half a million people have been murdered in South Africa?

That is enough dead South Africans to fill the FNB stadium over five times.

If we don’t use our vote to change the government soon, each and every one of us could become the next victim of the ANC’s failure to fight crime.

Don’t become a statistic.

Don’t let your family become a victim of crime.

Make sure you are registered to vote by going to check.da.org.za today.

The only way to get rid of crime in your community, is to get rid of the ANC!

The only way to protect your family from violent crime, is to vote in the DA!

If you vote the DA into government in Gauteng and nationally, we will bring our governance expertise right here to Soshanguve to bring down crime and make your streets safe!

Thank you.

Issued by John Steenhuisen, Leader of the Democratic Alliance, 29 January 2024