Crime statistics show Ramaphosa ‘has failed’ as a leader

Spiralling crime levels and the impact of the latest electricity tariff increase are among key issues organs of civil society want President Cyril Ramaphosa to tackle in today’s State of the Nation Address (Sona).

Action Society director for community safety Ian Cameron said women and children continued to be the most vulnerable sectors of the community, despite promises made by Ramaphosa in last year’s Sona to intensify war on crime.

Ramaphosa must deal with crime

He said: “When the most vulnerable citizens, children and women, aren’t safe, no-one is. The president, as leader of South Africa, has failed.

“During last year’s Sona, in his only mention of the crime situation, President Ramaphosa said the government would be intensifying the fight against gender-based violence and femicide through various plans and legislation.

“He said the legislation would go a long way to ensuring that cases were successfully prosecuted, that survivors were protected and that there would be more effective deterrents in place.

“In the past year 1 216 children were murdered – 200 more than the previous year. In the past year, sexual offences increased by more than 1 000 cases to 53 125.”

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Among other interventions Cameron called for were:

• A skills audit in the SA Police Service (Saps) to determine the merit of appointments and sacking of members not appointed on merit;
• To polygraph all members – starting with the leadership – to determine whether they had been involved in any corrupt activities and, if so, sack them; and
• The restoration of crime intelligence capabilities. Alternative Information and Development Centre economist Dominic Brown said the price of electricity had become increasingly unaffordable.

Privatising Eskom

“We should not be paying more for less electricity. The energy crisis and problems of Eskom is as a result of more than 20 years of bad policy decisions – included in this is a failure to provide Eskom with sufficient resources to adequately maintain and service coal fired power stations.

“The quickest way to address load shedding is to improve the performance of Eskom’s coal-fired power stations.“

“Privatising energy will have many negative outcomes, including rising prices and the accelerated collapse of Eskom, due to declining sale volumes,” said Brown.

“To address the collapse of [state-owned enterprises, or SOEs] it’s important that effective measures are taken to address corruption – a matter requiring the end of outsourcing and the public disclosure of all contracts.

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“Addressing the unsustainable financing model of SOEs is also critical. This means ending the dependence on raising resources from tariffs and debt to finance operational, maintenance and investment needs.”

Brown called on government to:

• Scrap the electricity tariff increase with immediate effect;
• Provide the licence and money needed for Eskom to buy diesel to run the open gas cycle turbines; and
• Use the Government Employees Pension Fund to take on some of Eskom’s debt, so that it could have the resources to finance the needed maintenance and investment in new generative capacity.