Most of his predecessors would have probably responded to the question with bravado — promising more boots on the ground and a kind of crackdown that would make the northern areas as peaceful as Shezhen and Chongqing in the People’s Republic of China. But Firoz Cachalia, perhaps precisely because he is an acting police minister with no long-term ambition to stay in the cabinet, preferred to tell it like it is. “I do not believe that we are currently in a position to defeat these gangs,” Cachalia told journalists gathered at the Gqeberha City Hall last week.
“They are on a killing spree in the Western Cape. There is a similar pattern in the Eastern Cape.” He confined his answer to the two provinces because those were the two provinces he had been asked about. But in reality, the problem is nationwide — the police are losing the battle against gangs and gang-driven crime and violence.
In fact, right now it feels like our police are losing the battle against all sorts of crime. Cachalia is still too new in the job to take the blame, and we all know the circumstances under which President Cyril Ramaphosa was forced to rope him in, grabbing him as he was about to start his retirement from a professorship at Wits University. But if we really want to understand why our national police service is losing the battle against crime, we need to look no further than the two dramas that are playing themselves out on our televisions, almost on a daily basis — the Madlanga commission and the parliamentary ad hoc committee.
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The two processes were established by Ramaphosa and parliament, respectively, in response to damning allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi to the effect that senior police management, including the now suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu, were effectively working for criminal syndicates. Almost every witness who has appeared before these two processes, whether they are on the side of Mkhwanazi or not, has given us more reason to believe that our police service is not only infiltrated, but has been captured by criminals. This week, listening to the disheartening testimony of Major-General Lesetja Senona, the head of the Hawks in KwaZulu-Natal, one could not help but conclude that we have deployed a lot of wolves to look after the sheep and the results are devastating.
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