Mashaba shares CoJ and JMPD ‘slide’ dividing crime up into African nationalities

Outgoing Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba shared information divided up into columns for five African countries – Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe – with statistics on how much crime, and which types of crime, the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD) has documented as being committed by people of these nationalities.

Mashaba accompanied the info, which appears to be a photograph of a page of a document with JMPD and City of Johannesburg (CoJ) logos on it – with the hashtag #WorldCupofCrime.

It is unclear where the table comes from, why it was created and why only crime by these specific nationalities was documented.

JMPD spokesperson Wayne Minaar said he couldn’t say where the document comes from. He added, “when we make an arrest we do take down all of the information including their nationality”, and said The Citizen would need to speak to the City of Johannesburg or Mashaba’s spokesperson for more information.

Questions were sent to Mashaba’s spokesperson, who had not responded at the time of publication.

In September, Mashaba doubled down following accusations of xenophobia that followed him saying on CNBC Africa he had “nothing to apologise for” following a spate of xenophobic attacks in the city.

In a tweet, the mayor said rather than him needing to apologise for the attacks, the country should apologise for not doing enough about international drug syndicates.

“The country owes an official apology to thousands, if not millions, of our young girls who are turned into forced prostitution by international drug syndicates. We are not going to turn a blind eye on such evil crime happening under our watch,” he said.

READ MORE: Mashaba says ANC is copying his ideas, even the ones slammed for ‘xenophobia’

Mashaba has been accused of xenophobia several times.

These accusations are as a result of several comments, including him saying that “foreigners‚ whether legal or illegal‚ are not the responsibility of the city” and that his municipality “will only provide accommodation exclusively to South Africans”.

Mashaba also claimed that “undocumented foreigners make up 80% of Joburg inner city”, an assertion AfricaCheck debunked. Professor Loren Landau from the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand called the mayor’s statement “an absurd and dangerous distortion of the truth”.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.