President acknowledges crime is a problem

Speculation before President Thabo Mbeki's State of the Nation address on Friday was not about what he would say or do about the country's high crime rate, but about whether he would mention it at all.

In the event, Mbeki did speak about crime and Johann Burger, a senior crime researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, an academic think-thank, said he was "rather surprised by the time he allotted to it" in his address at the opening of parliament.

The president's take on crime was so eagerly anticipated that news snaps sent out minutes after his speech reported that he had mentioned the word 'crime' 16 times, as opposed to mentioning it twice in his previous state of the nation address.

In 2006 just over 18,000 people were murdered in South Africa and on average 151 women were raped daily - statistics that prompted Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu to remark: "Just look what happens with a car hijacking. The scared owner hands over the keys and, for no earthly reason, he or she is shot dead in cold blood for the sheer hell of it; utterly gratuitously, wantonly."

Mbeki's parliamentary address was an about-face on his recent comments during a national radio broadcast that crime was "a perception", which provoked widespread anger.

On Friday he told South Africans: "Certainly, we cannot erase that which is ugly and repulsive, and claim happiness that comes with freedom if communities live in fear, closeted behind walls and barbed wire, ever-anxious in their houses, on the streets and on our roads, unable freely to enjoy our public spaces. Obviously, we must continue and further intensify the struggle against crime."

The president said the police force would be boosted from about 152,000 to more than 180,000 over the next three years, and that their living and working conditions, as well as levels of training, would be improved. He also vowed to improve intelligence gathering, border controls, the efficiency of the courts, to build new prisons and create greater cooperation between the police and the private security industry.

Burger said the increase in police numbers - currently one policeman for every 373 people, which was already above United Nations recommendations of one police officer for every 400 people - and Mbeki's use of words, such as "decisive" and "eradicate", illustrated that he was taking the fight against crime seriously.

Although the annual budget for the criminal justice system rose from US$2.3 billion in 2001 to $4.2 billion in 2006, Burger said the real problem in the fight against crime was "command and control", or the management and leadership of the police, an issue Mbeki acknowledged in his speech and promised would be improved.

Governments in both the developed and developing world "tend to rely on the criminal justice system to solve crime problems, and neglect socioeconomic issues," Burger commented.

South Africa's unofficial unemployment rate is estimated at around 40 percent - against the official unemployment figure of 25.6 percent. Although South Africa is the continent's economic powerhouse, 34.1 percent of its almost 48 million people live on US$2 or less a day.

"None of the great social problems we have to solve is capable of resolution outside the context of the creation of jobs and the alleviation and eradication of poverty," Mbeki said. The "cold reality" was that "the overwhelming majority of violent crimes against the person occur in the most socio-economically deprived areas of our country, and require strong and sustained community interventions focused on crime preventions."

The president has been seen as a denialist by his detractors, with the evidence most widely used for this view being his handling of South Africa's HIV/AIDS pandemic, which was allegedly characterised by a lack of political will, a questioning the disease's existence, and a dalliance with AIDS dissidents. The country has the world's second highest number of HIV/AIDS cases.

So, when Mbeki dismissed crime in South Africa as exaggerated during a radio interview last month, and a few days later national police commissioner Jackie Selebi, a personal friend of an alleged crime syndicate boss, asked "what's all the fuss about crime", there was a storm of public outrage.

A cellular phone text message campaign gathered over 400,000 signatories in 48 hours, thousands of letters were sent directly to the president, and tourism organisations cited crime as the reason the industry - seen as a main engine for creating employment - was at less than 50 percent of its capacity.

National sentiment about the level of crime reached near hysteria after the murder of the internationally renowned historian, David Rattray, in late January; then rose by several notches a few days ahead of Mbeki's speech when First National Bank, one of South Africa's largest, apparently came under political pressure to abort a million-dollar advertising campaign designed to force the government to take crime seriously.

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