Our ‘insecurity cluster’ so utterly useless… we need more than silly words

Tembisa burns. A gang of heavily-armed zama-zama illegal miners gatecrashes a film shoot and rapes and robs.

Just a normal week in South Africa… but what do both incidents have in common?

What links them is the fact that crime intelligence or, indeed, any government intelligence structure, had no inkling of what was about to unfold.

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No on-the-ground information that Tembisans were so unhappy with service delivery that they would go on the rampage.

No on-the-ground information that the zama-zamas are armed with military grade weapons.

It is axiomatic that our government security cluster would be more appropriately named the “insecurity cluster”, so utterly useless are they in providing security for ordinary South Africans.

Experts we spoke to are of the opinion that it is beyond time that these services – intelligence and the police – are thoroughly reformed.

But that will not be easy, given that our spooks, particularly, have been used not to protect the country against internal and external threats, but as foot soldiers in the ANC’s ongoing faction fighting.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons for the tardy reaction last year to what President Cyril Ramaphosa called “an insurrection” in KwaZulu-Natal and other parts of the country.

Perhaps our spooks either backed the looters and rioters – or they were waiting to see which way the wind would blow.

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Either option shows how they cannot perform their jobs for the benefit of the nation as a whole.

And, it is beyond belief that nothing has been done to deal with the phenomenon of armed gangs – whether local or foreign – who have established, as the zama-zamas did, de facto “liberated zones” where they, and not the authorities, are the law.

This is a crisis which requires more than silly words from an attention-seeking man with many hats.