President Cyril Ramaphosa has vowed to put more resources in the fight against crime and this will allow the State to fight illegal mining, the construction mafia and vandalism to infrastructure.
He said they have hired more than 20,000 police officers to strengthen the South African Police Service (SAPS) in the fight against crime.
Police Minister Bheki Cele has been urging Ramaphosa for some time that they need more boots on the ground because of the dwindling number of officers.
Ramaphosa said they have been able to establish specialised task teams to fight illegal mining, the construction mafia and damage to infrastructure.
Late last year, Ramaphosa deployed 3,300 soldiers to fight illegal mining. They will work with the SAPS.
Ramaphosa, who was replying to the debate on the State of the Nation Address on Thursday, said they have beefed up the police and will put in more resources to fight crime in the country.
“In addition to the 20,000 new police recruits, we have established specialised SAPS Economic Infrastructure Task Teams to work with business, private security and state-owned enterprises to tackle illegal mining, construction site extortion, cable theft and vandalism of economic infrastructure.
“By November last year, the task teams had made over 4,000 arrests for damage of critical infrastructure, 70 arrests for extortion at construction sites and over 3,000 arrests for illegal mining, and confiscated significant quantities of copper cable, rail tracks and other metals,” said Ramaphosa.
Cele said recently that they have established 18 task teams to fight these crimes.
The task teams have been deployed across the country.
Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure Sihle Zikalala was involved in a public spat with the opposition a few months ago over the number of suspects in the construction mafia who have been arrested.
This was after he gave figures that were different to the ones given by Ramaphosa in Parliament last year.
But Cele said that since they established the task teams, extortion cases at construction sites have dropped.
He said this was due to the special task teams that have been sent to 20 districts in the country to crack down on the construction mafia.
siyabonga.mkhwanazi@inl.co.za
Politics