Allegations of civilian assaults, extortion rackets and abuse of power had communities crying foul about Panyaza Lesufi’s crime wardens. Moegoe of the Year Winner:The figure whose sheer foolishness or blundering defined the year. If wasting taxpayer money on a doomed crime-fighting unit were an Olympic sport, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi would win a gold medal for his Gauteng crime prevention wardens, also known as amaPanyaza, launched with great fanfare in early 2023.
Their mission was straightforward: fight crime, patrol neighbourhoods, report suspicious activity and restore a sense of safety. Thousands of mostly unemployed people were recruited with promises of jobs and purpose in the battle against Gauteng’s soaring crime rates. But they had no proper training or legal authority to arrest, and little supervision, making them less saviours and more neighbourhood nuisances.
Allegations ofcivilian assaults, extortion rackets and the abuse of power had communities crying foul. They overstepped their mandate and in Soweto and Pretoria hotspots, and residents recounted harassment raids on shebeens and spaza shops where wardens allegedly pocketed goods under the pretence of “crime prevention”. In October, Public Protector Kholeka Gcaleka declared the entire operation unlawful and irregular.
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Her report was clear: without proper legal backing, the wardens were roaming neighbourhoods without authority. She exposed systemic failures in oversight, training and management, describing a programme that was not only ill-conceived, but dangerously out of control. Financially, amaPanyaza was an expensive white elephant.
Opposition and watchdog estimates show the provincial government funnelled more than R1.5-billion into the programme for salaries, uniforms, vehicles, office setups and barely there training. Rather than admitting failure and scrapping the programme, Lesufi and his team proposed retraining the wardens as traffic police. Does swapping one failed operation for another mean lessons were learned, or is it an attempt to rewrite a costly disaster? For many, it feels like an attempt to cover up past mistakes.
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