Nhleko, Phiyega are not up to the job

ACCORDING to your article “Don’t blame police for high murder rate” (The Star, September 30), Police Minister Nathi Nhleko, with the acquiescence of our self-awarded, multimedalled police commissioner General Riah Phiyega, told the public that “to think that they can resolve the issue of murder is just hallucination”.

And, in case he was not clear enough, he went on to say the fact that he disagreed with us, the people that he is supposed to keep safe, did not mean “he must give us a punch in the face” but rather that he must have adequate skills to resolve our differences. Is this an admission that he is not qualified for the job?.

The minister of police is quite right inasmuch as we do not think he and his acolyte are able, or perhaps even interested in, resolving the issue of murder in our country.

We all remember that when the crime statistics were released this time last year, Phiyega told us poor victims – past present and future – that it was our responsibility to protect ourselves by making our homes impregnable to the assault of criminals.

Actually, the commissioner did not use these exact words but the meaning was clear – protect yourselves because I am not going to do anything to protect you.

To add insult to injury, these two inept civil servants have turned statistics around and told us that we do not have anything to worry about. The statistics, they say, prove that crime is a “societal problem”.

Crime increases year after year but they catalogue dead people, brutalised people, attacked people, burglaries and robberies into a nice tidy niche which they call a “societal problem”. In other words, we the people who form our society, or our neighbours, are to blame for the crime and the higher the volume of crime, the higher our responsibility.

I look forward to the time when a minister and a police commissioner bow their heads in shame each time a home is burgled or one police officer is killed or a farmer and his family are murdered.

They have to be right at the forefront of the news, explaining why they had no preventive measures in place to stop homes from being burgled or pedestrians from being mugged.

We have the resources to implement those measures but we do not have the right people to do the job properly.

A minister who does not do his job is not only a danger to the country but a personal insult to the people.

Our president should take care in his appointments and think about the present and the future of the country and not just his personal well-being.

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Greenside, Joburg