Durban — The Democratic Alliance in KwaZulu-Natal has called for an urgent multi-party dialogue to address the province’s organised crime epidemic.
The party has called for KZN Community Safety and Liaison MEC Sipho Hlomuka to arrange an urgent dialogue with the province’s top political leaders to discuss the issue of organised crime.
DA KZN spokesperson on community safety and liaison, Sharon Hoosen said the call comes after a dramatic increase in shootings during the past few weeks including the shooting and killing of five men in Mariannhill near Durban on Monday, the recent high-profile murder of Kiernan ‘AKA’ Forbes and Tebello ‘Tibz’ Motsoane and several politically-related killings involving traditional leaders during the last few weeks.
“The laid-back attitude towards growing crime levels by KZN’s top brass – along with the inability to come up with a clear plan to keep our communities safe – has led to a situation where criminals are running amok in our province.
“Government structures are failing dismally to strategically utilise already scarce policing resources. This, while specialised units such as crime intelligence – whose sole responsibility it is to gather information on the ground and prevent such heinous crimes – are invisible and might as well be on holiday,” Hoosen said.
Hoosen said that given the situation, the DA has serious doubts that the province’s third quarter crime statistics – due for release later this week – will show any improvement in the fight against crime. Instead, the party anticipates that we are likely to continue seeing the upward trajectory that has existed for the past five years, she said.
“The reality is that KZN is a crime-ravaged province. Despite this, since Covid-19 first hit in 2020, the budget allocated to the province’s Department of Community Safety and Liaison has in fact gone backwards, from R249 million in 2020/2021 to R236 million in 2022/23.
“That this budget is the lowest across all provincial government departments speaks volumes about the ANC’s commitment to ensuring the safety of our citizens.
“Without the necessary funding, there can be little hope of tackling crime. This situation has led to a severe lack of capacity in terms of SAPS officers, with the result that they are under-resourced, under-trained and underpaid, while forced to put up with numerous ongoing infrastructure challenges,” Hoosen explained.
She said the DA has offered many solutions to KZN’s crime epidemic but there is an apparent lack of political will to implement them. In the interim, the knock-on effect on the people of our province is devastating.
She also said that the DA expects MEC Hlomuka to act without delay and initiate dialogue with the province’s major political leaders. The current situation cannot continue, she said.
Hoosen added that next year the people of KZN will go to the polls. They will have the opportunity to vote for a government that takes their safety seriously. That government is the DA, she said.
Meanwhile, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) report on Strategic organised crime risk assessment: South Africa released in September 2022, tackled organised crime in South Africa.
The GI-TOC said that organised crime is an existential threat to South Africa’s democratic institutions, economy and people. It often lies behind and connects numerous seemingly disparate criminal incidents we see occurring in South Africa every day.
The GI-TOC report revealed that organised violence – in the shape of assassination-for-hire – has become an enabling element of many criminal activities and a flourishing illicit market in its own right.
Professional hitmen are in high demand within the taxi industry and organised crime markets and are also contracted by political and business actors to remove rivals and threats, making assassination a strategic tool for under- and upper-world actors alike, it said.
KZN has long been the epicentre of assassination in South Africa, but there have been significant peaks in many other provinces. Beyond the lethal human harm, assassinations have a profound impact on the state, fuelling intra-party tension within the ANC, corroding the criminal justice system (through the assassination of whistle-blowers, for instance) and undermining democracy in general.
“The two main recruitment markets for hitmen are the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape taxi associations and the gangs of the Western Cape.
“KwaZulu-Natal saw a spike in organised crime hits in 2019 alongside its spike in political hits,” the GI-TOC said.
The GI-TOC also said that KZN has for many years suffered the highest number of political assassinations of any South Africa province.
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