Government has plan to protect infrastructure – but why only now?

One of the benefits of working in law is knowing the vast amount of literature that’s freely available. Can you believe some people actually pay to read? If you’re willing to dull yourself to the level of taking interest in policy, there’s this great free “magazine” called the government gazette.

In one of the most recent issues, it laid out some draft regulations to protect critical infrastructure in terms of an Act parliament passed back in 2019 to – would you believe it – protect critical infrastructure.

Credit where it’s due. We should all love us some critical infrastructure to the point of protecting it, so it’s bizarre that this is happening 29 years into democracy. One would think that we didn’t have things like a police service, a military, even municipal law enforcement. Even with those things, critical infrastructure has taken a hit.

But rest easy citizens because the Civilian Secretariat for the Police Services has the solution. Also, if you’ve only just found out about the Civilian Secretariat for the Police Services and have no idea what they do, it’s something to do with advising the Minister of Police.

So Bheki Cele’s boys have proposed, in a 74-page solution, to do the most South African thing possible to address a problem – why let’s establish a new council of course. But this won’t be just any council, no, no, no! This council will out-council and be more council-y than any council has ever councilled before.

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For you see, this council will have ad hoc committees, standing committees, oversee something called a Critical Infrastructure Protection Regulator which will have a head within the police services.

This person, who cannot be of a police rank lower than level 14, whatever that means, will have the incredibly difficult job of travelling across the country and identifying which infrastructure should be regarded as “critical”. Assumingly, that’s because if it’s not critical, bugger protecting it or at least leave it for the level 13 dudes.

This is the sad truth; they’ve let things slip so hard that now there needs to be identification of what to protect and supposedly what to give less attention to. Ordinarily, that would make sense; prioritising of resources is a great idea. Prioritising of resources simply to slow the descent without any plan to solve the underlying problem though, is an alarming proposition.

Even in 1900, an idiotic bunch of thrifty Brits could come up with a better, simpler way to protect the rail network. You’d think that in 2023, we don’t have electric alarms, drones and a whole military waiting to do nothing until the day Lesotho decides to come for the Free State.

Of course, we have those things but executing them would require at least one of two things; fewer people on the payroll or people on the payroll who actually do a valuable job.

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Paying a drone surveillance operating team will be significantly more effective than paying a cop to stay in a bunch of hotels across the country armed with a stamp that presses “CRITICAL” on any infrastructure they deem fit. But then it would also mean one less lovely space in the patronage network regardless of the benefit to the South African people. You know which way our leadership will lean already; it’s nearly automatic.

So, let’s all take a moment and give thanks to our hitherto unknown Civilian Secretariat for the Police Services. Without them, we wouldn’t have had this delightful 74-page literature and would be compelled to read some Meghan Markle fan fiction.

However, we have them and we have this literature and instead of getting excited about another council, we’re left with the question; Yo! Police! What have you been doing up ‘til now and why has it not been protecting critical infrastructure?

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