DA accuses ‘total shutdown’ protesters of just pushing a pro-ANC agenda

After community members on Wednesday at the Bonteheuwel multi-purpose centre demanded that City of Cape Town mayoral committee member for safety and security JP Smith and local councillor Angus McKenzie leave a meeting with Police Minister Bheki Cele, Smith has maintained he and his DA colleague had every right to be there.

Total shutdown organisers had, however, objected, saying: “We will not allow our cause and this meeting to be used and taken over by a political party.”

Cele was meeting with members of the total shutdown protest movement in Bonteheuwel a day after protesters brought several areas of the city to a standstill.

Smith said Cele had invited them and then appeared to forget this when faced by the protesters. Smith further alleged that his ejection from the meeting was somehow orchestrated politically and that the people who were objecting to his presence had “well-known political affiliations and links to the ANC and Cosatu (including Cosatu employees), [who] entered the hall late and then demanded the exclusion of myself and ward councillor McKenzie”.

He added that: “We had been invited by SAPS, on behalf of the national minister. Strangely Minister Cele at first denied this and after being confronted with the e-mail acknowledged the invitation. He then asked myself and Cllr. Angus McKenzie to leave the meeting.”

The invitation that was extended from the SAPS.

Smith said the meeting had a “political agenda”.

He accused the shutdown group of being politically motivated, “and it was clear today that the shutdown protestors do not represent these communities, which is why they could only muster 450 protesters yesterday. In fact, after I left the hall today a group of people left behind me and came outside to express their disgust at the behaviour of shutdown leaders. One said: ‘It is clear they don’t want solutions, just to play politics.'”

He said the genuine plight of communities plagued by crime was therefore being hijacked by “political fronts”.

“I had hoped that the minister would have come to the community of Bonteheuwel today with solutions, answers and interventions.”

He claimed that this had not been forthcoming, and Cele’s had been “exposed” as having “no plans to improve policing, that he has only excuses for the SAPS failures and has now called for an Imbizo to discuss the policing shortcomings, looking for others to provide him with solutions”.

However, Cele had told the group that he had plans to restore a dedicated anti-gang unit in Cape Town.

Smith listed a number of questions that he had hoped to hear answers to from Cele:

• Why 4,502 police officers were removed from the Western Cape in the last 4 years;
• Why the national justice system continues to fail to convict gangsters with a 2% or 3% conviction rate; and
• Why Cape Town now has 560 people for every one police officer while the rest of South Africa gets to have 369 people for every police officer.

Smith said his Metro Police Department had done what it could to contribute to fighting crime in the city and he listed the following stats on their work:

• 5,291 arrests
• 29,654 DUI screenings
• 16,627 units of drugs have been confiscated
• 78 fire arms and 161 other weapons have been confiscated
• 1118 ammunition confiscations
• A total of 5,864 operations were conducted
• 32,531 persons searched
• 14,288 by-law offences attended to.

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