It’s criminal the way we are unable to deal with our crime

The primary responsibility of any government or state is the protection of life and property of its citizens. That’s its raison d’être. Everything else pales into insignificance. Judged by that yardstick, this government has been a hopeless failure. It’s almost as though it doesn’t exist. The citizens are basically left to their own devices.

And so the crime figures released by police minister Bheki Cele this week are no surprise at all. He shouldn’t have bothered. He wasn’t telling us anything new. He should probably only let us know when the situation improves. Right now it is prohibitively bad, and the message hasn’t changed since as long as we can remember. It’s a stuck record. The word “crime” does not even begin to describe the scary phenomenon gripping this country.

Cele is quoted as saying: “It was a bad day for me to present these stats to cabinet.” Well, he’s lucky he just had a bad day. Many of his compatriots don’t see the day. Fifty-seven of them will be murdered before the day is out. It is scary. We kill more people than a country involved in a civil war. We hunt each other like animals — prey and predators.

SA leads the world in every category of crime — murder, rape, armed robbery, car hijacking. Cash-in-transit heists last year increased by 142%. And there’s an innovation that’s very South African: the hijacking of buildings. We’ve alerted the world to new easy pickings.

Our rampaging crime rate has variously been ascribed to our apartheid past, to poverty, to huge inequality and indeed to criminals taking advantage of our new-found freedoms and a police force understaffed, underpaid, unappreciated and demoralised by its own incompetence.

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich,” John F Kennedy famously remarked.

Poverty is clearly a factor and its eradication is crucial if we’re to make a dent in ridding our society of the scourge of crime. But sometimes one wonders whether poverty is not often offered as an easy and convenient excuse for our failings and incompetence. Neighbouring countries, for instance, which are much poorer and whose citizens have far less opportunities, have less crime. Incidentally, they also keep their surroundings much cleaner than we do.

Fact is we have the most useless government known to man. They can hardly run a tap. Anarchy would be preferable. At least we wouldn’t have to pay for it. We’ve even stopped blaming the government. We don’t hold it to account anymore. It’s a waste of breath.

Crime takes so much from all of us. It drains the energy. It’s tiring to have to keep looking over one’s shoulder all the time, to be on the lookout for somebody who may take your possessions or even your life. We therefore become wary of strangers. We cease to view people as fellow human beings with whom to fraternise, but as animals or monsters who are up to no good, or are out to get us.

It thus sows a general sense of unease or mistrust in society.

And in a polarised society such as ours, it adds a toxicity that exacerbates our problems.

But the country loses economically as well. People vote with their feet. They leave the country, and it’s often those with skills and who are obviously wealthy who are likely to emigrate. The departures mean the tax base shrinks and the government has fewer resources to deal with poverty and other social ills. New arrivals, if there are any, are not enough to compensate for the skills lost to emigration.

It also becomes difficult to attract foreign investment. No individual in his right mind would invest in a crime-ridden country or relocate personnel and their families here. The situation will now be made infinitely more difficult by the hysteria around land expropriation without compensation. It is a double whammy, especially given the shoddy manner in which the government has handled the land issue. We’re basically being impoverished by crime.

There was a flutter of excitement when Cele was appointed police minister, but, like anything else to do with the new regime, it’s proved to be just another false dawn. The task at hand is so huge it’s beyond the abilities of one man, no matter how capable he may be. It’s more than just a policing matter. We’ve lived for such a long time with violent crime that it’s almost become part of the furniture. It’s welded into our culture and our psyche.

But it’s also the elephant in the room, always lurking in the background and rarely confronted or talked about. President Cyril Ramaphosa, for instance, talks passionately about everything else — growing the economy, attracting foreign investment, and lately a great deal about land expropriation without compensation — except the scourge which is not only destroying lives but has turned the country into a lucrative hunting ground for criminals.

There’s a mistaken — misguided is the right word — belief that talking about crime will scare off foreign investors and tourists.

It’s not politic to do so, we’re told; an obsession of the rich. It’s in fact the failure to tackle the problem that has earned SA the moniker as the crime capital of the world. Addressing crime should be the country’s No 1 priority because if we don’t defeat it, everything else that we do will be doomed to fail.

A safe and secure environment is crucial to building a prosperous society.