Hiiraan Online

Haroon Siddiqui

PRETORIA–South Africa's junior minister of safety and security told police the other day: "You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations; that's my responsibility. Yours is to serve and protect."

That's not all that Susan Shabangu said. Speaking to an anti-crime rally, she went on – and on:

"I want to assure the police commissioners and policemen and women that they have permission to kill these criminals. I won't tolerate any pathetic excuses for your not being able to deal with crime.

"You have been given guns; now use them. I want no warning shots. You have one shot and it must be a kill shot. If you miss, the criminals will go for the kill. They don't miss. We can't take this chance ...

"If criminals dare to threaten the police or the livelihood or lives of innocent men, women and children, they must be killed.

"End of story.

"The constitution says criminals must be kept safe. But I say, no. I say, we must protect the law-abiding, not the criminals. Criminals must be made to pay for their crimes."

Civil libertarians were shocked. But everyone else cheered – not just the cops (one told Talk Radio: "She's right. I'm going to shoot and kill those bastards"), but also the public, fed up with rampant crime.

South Africa has the world's second highest rate of violent crime, after Colombia.

In the one week I was in the country, I ran into two victims of armed robberies. Rather than bemoan their losses, both were grateful for escaping unhurt. In one case, a house had been raided at gunpoint at midnight and all valuables taken, including the wedding rings of a newly married couple, who, relieved at being left alive, took the morning flight to their honeymoon.

People live in fortified homes. The friend I stayed with doesn't enter his if he spots young men around. When he does, past an electronically controlled iron gate, he sits in his locked car in the driveway until the gate is shut behind him.

All entrances to his house are locked 24/7. At night the family cordons itself behind a steel door that separates the bedrooms from the living room/kitchen area. Cameras scan the property from all angles.

The poor, about 90 per cent of the population of 48 million, are by far the bigger victims, and not just by virtue of their numbers.

Less than 20 per cent of crime is directed at the affluent, while 80 per cent occurs "between people who know one another," code language for crime among blacks.

"While one in nine South Africans is white, 32 out of 33 murder victims aren't. Dying by another's hand is not a fate that is equitably shared," writes Jonny Steinberg in Notes from a Fractured Country.

Every year, there are 19,000 murders (41 victims per 100,000 people vs. five in the U.S.); half a million cases of assault and attempted murders; 195,000 robberies, 126,000 of them involving arms; 85,000 stolen cars; and about 55,000 reported rapes (only one in 10 gets reported). Most heart-rending are child rapes, too gruesome to be described.

"We are an exceptionally, possibly uniquely, violent society," writes Antony Altbeker in his book, A Country at War with Itself.

Various explanations are offered.

"During apartheid, policing was more concerned with reinforcing the racial social structure than with preventing crime," writes Altbeker.

"After 1994, efforts were aimed at reining in police abuses. It was felt that police was one of the country's problems, not one of its most essential services."

Police forces dwindled. Crime syndicates mushroomed, and with them drugs and carjackings.

Crime kept rising with greater urban poverty (of those working, two-thirds earn $2 a day and a third $1 a day); the calamity of HIV/AIDS ("If you're going to die anyway, you don't care if you kill," goes the popular refrain); and high unemployment (pegged at 28 per cent but widely seen to be about 40 per cent.)

People complain that jobs are being taking away by foreigners, estimated at between 5 million and 8 million – Nigerians, Senegalese, Somalis, etc. but mostly Zimbabweans, up to 3 million and growing at 1,000 a day, escaping Robert Mugabe.

Migrant workers are exploited by employers or attacked by thugs.

But the government retains a soft spot for the poor foreigners, a nod to pan-African solidarity against apartheid. The liberation "exiles" who found refuge across the continent, especially in the "front-line states," can hardly turn down the economic exiles from those lands.

On the crime front, President Thabo Mbeki and others dismissed middle-class dismay – a.k.a. white angst – as nothing more than an irrational fear of blacks.

But it's the black majority that's most affected, as Altbeker says.

"Crime, after all, has rent apart the families of black South Africans for generations. It has traumatized and brutalized people who had (and have) no access to private security or insurance policies – people who, until recently, have also had little recourse to the police."

By the time the government responded, the problem had become so big that police would succeed on one front only to see problems spike on several others. And officialdom would fluctuate between contradictory claims of having fixed the problem or arguing that it could not possibly do so, so soon after apartheid.

Now a new push is underway.

Police forces are being built up (back to 160,000 and growing at 10,000 a year). Tough rules and laws are to be implemented, at last. And there's plenty of tough talk. Still, it was quite something to hear a veteran black African National Congress politician like Shabangu say that criminal bastards be shot dead – bang! – just like that.

Cynics say the government wants to get the law-and-order situation under control in time to host the 2010 World Cup of soccer.

No matter the motivation, the public – blacks, whites, browns and every shade in between – would be most grateful.