Programme Director;
Members of the Executive Council;
KZN Police Commissioner and Leadership of SAPS;
Leadership from the Criminal Justices System including the NPA, the Judiciary, and Correctional Services;
Chairperson of the KwaZulu-Natal House of Traditional Leaders;
Leaders of our faith-based organisations;
Civil Society Representatives;
Captains of Industry;
Scholars, Researchers, and Social Activists;
Members of the Fourth Estate;
Victims of Crime who will be sharing their testimonies;
Distinguished Guests;
Ladies and Gentlemen;
Sanibonani! Habari! Salaam! Shalom!
INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT
It is an immense honour to participate with all of you at this crucial KwaZulu-Natal Crime Prevention Summit.
On behalf of the Provincial Government and the people of KwaZulu-Natal, we wish to convey our sincere gratitude to everyone who has responded positively to our call by attending the Summit.
We also wish to applaud those who will be facilitating various commissions, and in particular, the various speakers who will be leading in discussions, sharing knowledge and expertise on how KwaZulu-
Natal could prevent and reduce crime.
We cannot thank enough our most important guests who are opening their wounds for us to touch and sharing their lived experiences as victims of crime.
One is using “victims” advisedly here to acknowledge that when a crime is committed, there is a perpetrator or an offender while there is also someone who suffer the harm. Sometime the victim is a family or an entire community. And so, there can be no doubt that in sharing these unique human experiences, the sufferers are reclaiming their power, their voice, and their agency thereby refusing to be defined by the offender.
As we meet to encourage our men and women in blue to do more to serve and protect the Republic and its people, we also wish to say we recognise that police themselves are also victims of crime. They die in the line of duty or when they are off work. Day by day, criminals seem to be getting emboldened, some even target police stations to steal firearms. Not long ago, they even murdered a prosecutor in our province. It will take all of us not to let our country live in fear or to be run by those with a mafia mentality.
While crime is a big challenge affecting the whole country as we see through the crime statistics and daily reports in the media, the experience of crime, healing, and recovery from it is a very personal journey and we hope that as we are reminded about the real impact of crime, we can be sensitized to remember that behind the crime figures, we have real human beings who have been made to suffer.
And may such recollections propel this Summit to hasten to craft the strategies that will prevent and reduce crime.
The Summit is definitely not about reinventing the wheel and regurgitating policies, strategies, and plans that are already in the public domain. Our country, and indeed our province, has produced some of the best crime-fighting policies and strategies. We must use this Summit to identify the gaps and more importantly, on how best we can improve the implementation of these strategies to combat and prevent crime.
In this room, we have the best brain trust and experts in the science or field of crime. We also have our men and women who work hard to bring to book those who break the laws of the land. We appreciate too the participation of those who work on rehabilitation and correcting offending behaviour so that ex-offenders could be best integrated into society as they pursue their second chances.
This Summit, as articulated by other colleagues, is an outcome of a decision by the Executive Council of the Provincial Government which sat early this year from the 16th to the 18th of February. We hope, through your contributions, experience, and expertise, we can craft effective solutions to crime while enhancing better collaboration of all stakeholders.
We cannot overemphasise the point that gets made all the time that crime-fighting is a societal responsibility, not only an obligation of law enforcement agencies. It is clear from crime statistics that our province and our country is experiencing more crime. This means that we are not as yet effectively implementing our crime-fighting strategy. We need to organise ourselves much better and collaborate effectively as various actors if we are to succeed in eliminating crime and creating safer, peaceful communities.
We cannot, moving from this Summit, continue to do the same things and expect different results.
We look to this Summit to show us the way and to agree on the plans that we need to implement to create a safer KwaZulu-Natal. We have no doubt that our discussions will be robust and constructive.
Being invested in finding lasting solutions to crime, we can assure you that the Provincial Government stands ready to pay attention, learn, and implement.
Crime does not only threaten the personal safety of the people of KwaZulu-Natal, but it also risks giving our province a bad reputation which can scare away investors including visitors who are the anchor of the tourism industry in our province. As we try to build back better and rebuild the KwaZulu-Natal in the context of COVID-19, the aftermath of the July 2021 deadly civil unrest, and the devastating floods in April and May, we simply cannot afford that KwaZulu-Natal should carry on being synonymous with violence and some of the most heinous crimes.
We want to lead in creating socially cohesive and peaceful communities that honour human dignity and uphold the human rights of others.
We want to be known as the most hospitable and peaceful province, not a province associated with hired hitmen or izinkabi. We cannot rest on our laurels with so many cases where councillors and political activists in various political parties get assassinated. It cannot be business as usual as we witness our traditional leaders being killed and people being kidnapped for monetary gain.
We have a vision of a society that does not treat girls and women as second class citizens or subordinates of men. We are here because we want an end to the abuse and murder of women and children.
We also do not want a KwaZulu-Natal where many of its men, young black men to be more precise, are either in prison or at the cemetery.
As we engage in various commissions, let us also pay attention to the crimes that people at the farms face as well as our rural communities who are battling the theft of their livestock. Working with you, we want to realise the vision of the architects of our freedom who suffered and laid their lives for a South Africa that is truly united, non-racial, non-sexist, equal, and prosperous.
SOME COMMENTS ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Societies across the world have a prevalence of crime. No country, no community is immune from it regardless of the socio-economic status of a place and its people.
Those who commit crime are drawn from both the educated and those without much formal education. Crime is committed by the powerful and the rich as much as it is committed by those who are poor and living in destitute circumstances. Those who break the law perform blue collar jobs just as they come from those involved in white collar jobs.
We have no intention to justify crime, but we are keen on understanding it better, informed by rigorous, evidence-based research so that we can tackle its roots, not just its symptoms. Evidence-based research indicate that in the majority of instances, offenders who get involved in violent crime often come from marginalised , disadvantaged, and poorly educated sections of society. Theft, robbery, and burglary for instance, is often a way through which such people seek to improve their living conditions and financial position.
The literature on crime suggests that extreme inequality, where opulence lives side by side with abject poverty, also fuels crime unlike in poor societies without high levels of inequality like South Africa – a country that is said to be the most unequal country on earth. It is in this regard that the Provincial Government of KwaZulu-Natal remains unapologetic about the need to build a fundamentally changed post-apartheid, deracialised economy that brings the majority who are black and African to the centre of the economy.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we will not win the battle against crime if we fail to mobilise the whole of KwaZulu-Natal province to be intolerant to crime. Our hope lies with communities themselves who should unite behind efforts to prevent crime within the ambit of the law. Criminals live in communities and when communities stand up and work side by side with the police we can say we have a chance of drastically reducing crime.
While new crime-fighting laws and tough sentences can deter crime and are important to send a strong message to society that we are intolerant to crime, we also need to do more to instil positive social values and cultivate moral regeneration so that individuals and communities can on their own refrain from committing crime.
There can be no doubt that following a path of morality, ethical behaviour, and a life of virtue is key to preventing crime. In this regard, we call on parents, families, teachers, faith-based communities, and our traditional leaders to play their active part in helping instil good morals in children from an early age.
It is really encouraging that this Summit will focus on preventing behaviour that attracts people to crime – or violent criminal behaviour. This approach recognises that prisons or correctional centres are not the solution to crime. When people say lock offenders and throw the key to the sea, this ignores that South Africa’s prisons are always overcrowded and overflowing with offenders. We can only build so many prisons, and often, they become breeding grounds for crime. The approach to crime prevention demands that we must have a systematic, integrated, coordinated approach combining the responsibilities of a wide all stakeholders, including NGOs, communities, and the private sector.
Given the scourge and shameful crime of abuse and murder of women in our country, we call on parents, men and fathers, in particular, to play an active role in socialising boy children to treat girls as their equals, not inferiors. We must all fight patriarchy, sexism, toxic masculinity, and the terrible hate crimes that are directed at the LGBTQI community.
Many of these crimes against women occur far away from police, in homes, and are often committed by people that women and girl children themselves know and trust. They are a challenge to police.
We have a collective duty to encourage girls and women who get violated by relatives and family members to gain strength and report these offenders. It is also our task to discourage families and sometimes our traditional leaders from protecting abusive men.
In this regard, we call on our traditional leaders and traditional healers to take a stand against people who murder people and mutilate them apparently to use their body organs in rituals that would make them rich. We also encourage our traditional healers to report to police people who approach them to be cleansed after committing heinous crimes. We must be united that it is not our culture to murder people with albinism, that it is not our culture to mutilate others to be powerful or make money. The motivation is pure evil and greed.
To succeed in preventing crime, we should pay attention to the causal factors and the structural drivers of crime. Police keep telling us, for instance, that there is a definite link between alcohol, drugs and crime. We also know that people living in neighbourhoods with poor lighting at night or living in unsafe homes are likely to be at a greater risk of being targeted by criminals.
SOME WAYS TO PREVENT CRIME
Ladies and Gentlemen, let me quickly refer to some of the measures available in the literature on crime prevention that we should consider in our efforts to reduce crime.
o STRICTER ALCOHOL CONTROL. Since alcohol is a big factor behind crime, car accidents, spread of diseases, communities and government should look into better regulation of the alcohol industry as well as reducing alcohol outlets and closing those near schools and places of learning. As with other countries, we could even look into passing laws that revoke a person’s right to consume alcohol if there is a pattern that the person commits violent crime when drunk.
o TARGETING CRIME HOT SPOTS. We have the evidence about the crime hotspots in KwaZulu-Natal. We know that many of the violent crimes occur in Ethekwini and around Pietermaritzburg. Police stations in Umlazi, Inanda, and Plessislaer often find themselves in the top 30 crime hotspots in the country. It means that we should continue to increase police visibility and deploying best police resources to reduce crime in such areas. Research shows that hot-spot policing reduces crime in those specific areas without necessarily taking it to other areas. These reductions in crime enthuse communities to work more with police.
o FOCUSED DETERENCE POLICING – Those involved in community policing should be empowered to pay attention to specific crimes that affect neighbourhoods. It could be a challenge around gangs, drugs, house break-ins, gun violence. Again, the community needs to be mobilised to stand together and convey an unambiguous message that it stands united against violence and crime.
o BEHAVOURAL INTERVENTION PROGRAMMES: We cannot overemphasise the need of inculcating good morals but also focusing on programmes aimed changing behaviour of youth that are at risk of committing crime. We should focus on creating well-targeted programmes: If the goal is to reduce sexual violence, then programme selection should be located in hotspot areas and focused on the population group most likely to commit this crime.
We need people who will model good behaviour and share experiences. As KwaZulu-Natal, we need to also work closely with the Department of Correctional Services by utilising some of their exemplary and rehabilitated offenders in crime prevention and crime-fighting. It has been demonstrated over and over that young people often learn a great deal when they hear offenders or ex-offenders explaining to them that crime does not pay. This is also a good way of ex-offenders paying back to society and integrating them back into communities.
o ELIMINATE DILAPIDATED HOUSING: Research shows that blighted housing and unclean neighbourhoods attract crime. In this regard, cleaning campaigns, home improvements, urban upgrading and better urban planning contribute to preventing and reducing crime.
o APPROACH VIOLENCE AS A HEALTH ISSUE: It is important that society treats violent crime as a health concern issue. This requires that we continue to uphold and promote a human rights ethos even as we deal with offenders. It means recognising the inherent dignity of all and focusing on parenting interventions, family interventions and health campaigns. This means that parents need to share better ways of instilling discipline in children instead of using violence which children can later use to get their way in life. As they say, violence begets violence.
o PAY ATTENTION TO GUN CONTROL: Police and crime intelligence tells us that there are too many guns, unlicensed firearms to be specific, which are in the hands of criminals. In KwaZulu-Natal, we are learning that some of these guns that get used in the commission of crimes come from the private security industry. We also need to look closely into the issue of guns that get inherited by surviving family members when an owner dies. In these instances, you find people not authorised to carry a firearm suddenly in possession of a gun. As the Provincial Government, we believe we need a focused campaign to encourage communities to surrender unlicensed firearms to the police. It is a simple fact that where there are no guns, we cannot talk about gun-related deaths.
o CRIME IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD: One writer reminds us that violence is going virtual, and that we need to understand this phenomenon much better. This is true for our province as it has been argued that, for instance, much of the July 2021 violence was encouraged on social media. Across the globe, social media has also become a space where people are recruited into extremist and terrorist groups.
We also know that much cyber-bullying happens on these social media platforms with devastating consequences, especially on young people. We know of instances where young people commit suicide after experiencing bullying and cyberbullying. More must be done to prevent bullying and cyberbullying especially at our schools.
MURDER OF AMAKHOSI AND IZINDUNA
Compatriots, we are deeply concerned about the murder of amakhosi and izinduna in recent times. Some of these murders emanate from conflicts around kingship and access to land. Unresolved kingship disputes also tend to spill over communities and get people who support different factions fighting. We have also seen, like in Richards Bay, how a protracted dispute over kingship caused violence and instability. It affected business resulting in major international investors threatening to leave KwaZulu-Natal.
It appears that at the heart of the murder of izinduna, is competition to be appointed as a headmen, especially now that izinduna get remunerated by the state. There is no doubt that this is an area requiring great leadership and conflict management in our rural areas. We hope that during your commissions, you can look into this worrying trend and offer possible solutions on how we can prevent the spilling of blood within the institution of ubukhosi.
POLITICS AND VIOLENCE
We trust that this Summit will also reflect on violence related to political parties. First, we must attest that our democracy has matured a great deal. There is political tolerance in KwaZulu-Natal. We no longer have no-go areas as it was in the eighties and nineties, leading to about 30 000 people who perished in the political violence. We have worked hard over the years to bring peace, stabilise the province, and advance development.
Much of the violence these days seems to be largely intra-party political violence. This does not mean that inter-party political violence has been completely exorcised. We have seen many deaths of councillors, especially within the governing African National Congress. We are also deeply concerned about the murder of officials in municipalities.
To some, being a councillor means having an income and also an opportunity to influence the awarding of tenders. It is in this context that we must be united as a society to rid the state of corruption and any attempts by the private sector to capture it to pervert it. We cannot win this fight against corruption if we do not focus on the businesses that seek to cut corners, and pay bribes in order to get government tenders. We have to do more to protect honest public servants, some who decide to be whistle-blowers reporting wrongdoing in government and the private sector.
VIOLENCE IN THE TRANSPORT INDUSTRY
South Africa and KwaZulu-Natal is still confronted with violence in the transport industry. Fights over routes still give the industry a violent image. As government, we will continue to work with the industry and its associations to improve passenger safety and to eliminate conflicts. One of the programmes that KwaZulu-Natal is involved in is to increase the participation of black people in the subsidised bus industry to 70%. A number of the beneficiaries from the support provided by the Department of Transport and Ithala are people in the taxi industry.
We also need the Department of Labour and Department of Home Affairs and other government entities to do more to enforce South African laws on migration, employment of foreign nationals in the South African logistic sector and even in the hospitality sector. The threat for violence targeting truck drivers who are non-nationals still remains. It shames all of us when we see Africans killing each other over scarce jobs, but this can be avoided if we enforce existing laws.
CORRECTIONAL SERVICES AND CRIME
Ladies and Gentlemen, South Africa is one of the countries in the world with high re-offending rates. There are many factors behind this, including society’s attitudes about ex-offenders and failure of reintegration programmes. Still, there can be no doubt that more must be done to look into the effectiveness of rehabilitation programmes in changing offending behaviour. As we speak, it is no exaggeration that some of our correctional centres are breeding grounds for crime. We need also to look closely at the parole system and ensure parolees do not disappear or end up committing crime in communities.
Thanks to outstanding law enforcers, we now know that some of the violent crimes actually get planned from correctional centres. We need to find solutions, including through the use of technology, to stop cell phones from getting into these facilities. We should find ways of investing in technology that can jam cell phones inside our correctional centres. It is these cell phones that get used in the commission of crimes.
It is disheartening to learn about allegations that some offenders are running lucrative businesses in these centres. For them, crime pays, even while they are serving their sentences. It is clear that criminals and their networks are better organised and more united than society is. This Summit must help us to change this.
BUILDING TRUST BETWEEN STAKEHOLDERS
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We are working hard to build a capable, ethical, developmental state. The image of government is currently battered with reports of corruption, including corruption in state-owned enterprises and organs of state. Covid-19 corruption has also betrayed the trust of the people in government. We recognise this as a major setback in our fight against corruption. We will not give up or be discouraged to create an ethical public service. A majority of public servants are honest and hardworking people who detest the theft of resources meant for the poor.
In KwaZulu-Natal, we will continue to work with all law enforcement agencies and the Auditor-General to fight corruption. We accept that the state needs to lead by example and demonstrate seriousness in preventing and fighting crime. In this regard, we call upon all public servants who are serving our nation in the criminal justice system to fight all attempts to corrupt or compromise them. We ask the police and correctional officials to also fight the few rotten apples who give the police and correctional services a bad name.
We must also find ways of ensuring that those who prosecute cases and magistrates and judges are men and women of high moral stamina and integrity to rebuild trust in the system and the rule of law.
We look to the courts too not to send different messages to society on the same crime – where there are minimum sentences, society expects to see consistency.
CONCLUSION
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The people of KwaZulu-Natal look to this summit to recommend practical ways and implantable plans to eradicate crime. It is tragic that their freedom continues to be threatened by violent offenders.
We look forward to your recommendations on how we can make crime fighting initiatives like Operation Vala a success. The campaign was affected by COVID-19, but this did not mean that criminals had taken a break at the height of the pandemic and lockdowns.
More than that, this Summit will make recommendations on our programme of action on preventing crime and instilling acceptable social behaviour.
There is no doubt too, that our engagement must help us to improve monitoring and evaluation on the effectiveness of our crime fighting strategies.
If indeed crime fighting is a responsibility we all share as a society, we hope that business will be encouraged to partner with government and communities in crime fighting and crime prevention initiatives and programmes. This means everybody should be serious about investing in creating a South Africa and KwaZulu-Natal that enjoy peace and security by all, not only those who can afford it.
We wish you well and look forward to receiving your report and recommendations.
Together Growing KwaZulu-Natal!
I thank you!