DA only cares about safety of rich in Western Cape – Cele

THE DA was hindering the fight against crime in the poor parts of Western Cape by pouring more resources into wealthy suburbs, Police Minister Bheki Cele said in Parliament yesterday.

Cele said police were coming under fire in the Cape Flats because, unlike in the leafy areas, there were no street lights and closed-circuit television cameras were allowed to fall into disrepair for years.

“There is no paradise Western Cape here. Let’s go to Khayelitsha, let’s go there. There is darkness, there are no lights in Samora Machel. If you go to Bishopscourt, to Hout Bay, it is forever daylight, the cameras are all working,” he said in the debate on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address.

“If you go to Site C, the police will be shot… the camera in Khayelitsha is eight years not working,” he said.

Cele said if the DA wanted to improve the lives of people in Western Cape, the only province where it is in power, it needed to make sure that there were security cameras in these areas.

Earlier this month, six members of the police’s Anti-Gang Unit were shot at on the outskirts of Samora Machel township.

Alan Winde, Western Cape premier, in April declared an inter-governmental dispute with Cele after claiming that the minister had repeatedly failed to respond to his correspondence outlining the need for greater policing resources in the province.

Cele told fellow MPs yesterday that the DA was responsible for the social environment in which crime flourished, and its disrespect for the poor was evident in its failure to provide the poor with flushable toilets.

DA shadow minister of police Andrew Whitfield said a DA-led national government would give more of the powers and functions of policing to provincial police commissioners and station commanders, so they are empowered to tackle crime at a local level.

“In spite of the president’s Sona promises that he would focus on the distribution of police resources to areas hardest hit by crime, the situation is getting worse. Over the past two years, Western Cape ratio has deteriorated from one police officer to every 385 people, down to one police officer to every 509 people.

“While the ANC government is playing politics with the lives of the people of Western Cape, those living in Nyanga, Mitchells Plain and Hanover Park have to fear for their lives.”