‘An insult to our democracy’
Buying of Casspirs by ethekwini Municipality is seen as a step towards repression and thuggery
The ethekwini Municipality is planning to buy four Casspir military vehicles at a cost of R19.9 million from state-owned arms manufacturer Denel.the vehicles would be used by the metro police for riot control.
DURBAN civil society is outraged at the ethekwini Municipality’s plan to buy militarised vehicles to use in response to community protests.
The organisations were reacting after The Sunday Tribune’s sister paper, The Mercury, reported that the city was in the process of buying four Casspirs at a cost of R19.9 million.
In a joint statement, the Church Land Programme and the Diakonia Council of Churches said the decision marked an alarming and unacceptable escalation of the local state’s increasingly repressive and intolerant response.
The city said the Casspirs, built by state-owned arms manufacturer Denel, would be used for crowd control and to deal with riot situations and land invasions.
“These vehicles will assist the metro police to carry out their duties while ensuring effective policing for crowd management deployment to ensure the safety of police members in riotous situations when rocks or petrol bombs are thrown,” said ethekwini spokesperson Tozi Mthethwa.
The organisations stated that buying these vehicles was entirely wrong.
They advised that stopping the purchase would at least provide a moment for the city as a whole to reflect on what the plan had already revealed about the capacity and approach for dealing with profound challenges.
The organisations also stressed that the protest actions themselves highlighted deep crises and challenges.
“What is needed is the effective and immediate deployment of skills focused on listening, on peaceful negotiations and inclusive dialogue.
“We need to seriously address the root causes of inequality, exclusion, patronage, elite indifference and arrogance that lie behind people’s protest actions.
“What the city officials have signalled through their plan to buy militarised ‘riot control’ hardware is the almost certainly delusional and dangerous idea that problems would be dealt with through repression and thuggery in defence of the status quo,” they said in their statement.
Sbu Zikode, the president of shack-dwellers movement Abahlali Basemjondolo, also slammed the buying of the Casspirs, saying this amounted to the militarisation of the metro police department.
“This is nothing but an insult to democracy. Clearly we have no leadership here when we have people who, rather than negotiate peacefully, resort to arming themselves,” said Zikode.