GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE
Ramaphosa dedicated a significant tract of his address to gender-based violence.
Ending it “is an urgent national priority that requires the mobilisation of all South Africans and the involvement of all institutions”, he said.
At the inaugural presidential Gender-based Violence Summit in November last year, Ramaphosa announced that the country would launch a national strategic plan to crisis.
“During the course of the past year as the presidency, we have paid particular attention to the violence and abuse perpetrated against women and children in our society,” he said.
Thousands of women took to the streets in August’s #Thetotalshutdown march to get the attention of the president, whose response was to call the summit.
The president’s promises on addressing gender-based violence were seemingly guided by the outcomes of the summit, which was criticised by some for failing to address the plight of working-class women.
Ramaphosa repeated his previous undertaking to dedicate more funds to support facilities such as Thuthuzela Care Centres and Khuseleka Care Centres. Government will also work to ensure the better functioning of sexual offences courts, Ramaphosa said.
At the summit last year, Ramaphosa said government would not rest until the eradication of gender-based violence was achieved. The allocation of funds to achieving this is promising but the president’s speech on Thursday reflected a slow start to addressing this urgent challenge. — that there will soon be an investigating unit to deal with serious corruption, housed in the office of the newly appointed prosecutions head Shamila Batohi and reporting directly to her, is a good sign. It indicates a will to address what is coming out of the state capture commission and the other commissions and inquiries.
Most significant is that the directorate will have both an investigative and prosecutorial capacity, seemingly along the same lines as the Scorpions, whose disbandment was widely viewed as a huge step backwards in the fight against crime.
The success of the Scorpions has often been attributed to the fact that the unit was made up of both investigators and prosecutors. The idea to revive the unit was first mooted by Batohi herself in her public interview for the job.
Ramaphosa said the directorate would also bring in capacity from the private sector.
He is also tackling intelligence, saying he would take “a number of urgent steps” to reconstitute a “professional national intelligence capability”. These include re-establishing the National Security Council and going back to two arms in the intelligence service — one focusing on domestic and one on foreign intelligence. The merger of the intelligence services happened a few months after Zuma became president in 2009.
When announcing the changes, Ramaphosa veered off script to say the reconstitution was directed at an intelligence function whose job was to “defend and protect the people of South Africa and not any party political official”, obliquely addressing the criticism that South Africa’s intelligence structures had been sidetracked from their real jobs.
He said, although the Zondo commission and others would “in time make findings and recommendations in line with their mandates, evidence of criminal activity that emerges must be evaluated by the criminal justice system”.
If there was reason to prosecute, “prosecutions must follow swiftly”, he said, implying that there would be no waiting for the commission to end before the criminal justice system could begin its work. — Franny Rabkin