Cape Town - The police’s inability to speedily make breakthroughs in targeted killings involving high-profile individuals makes it easy to be convinced that South Africa is sliding down the dangerous path of becoming a failed state.
Criminals have become so brazen that they attack their victims in public spaces in broad daylight. In fact, a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime report by analyst Rumbidzai Matamba, “The Business of Killing: Assassinations In South Africa”, paints a grim picture.
It recorded 141 assassinations in the country in 2022 alone – an average of more than two a week.
The latest incident involving former ANC youth league member and Cape Town councillor Loyiso Nkohla at a mobile police station is a murder that should outrage all of us.
He was known for having led what became the “poo protests” when he and other members of the Ses’Khona people’s rights movement threw human faeces at the Western Cape legislature, Cape Town International Airport and on the busy N2 highway.
They were highlighting the lack of sanitation among poor communities in informal settlements.
At the time of what has been described as his assassination on Monday, Nkohla had been leading negotiations between the government and residents who had built shacks on railway tracks.
The efforts would pave the way for the full reopening of the once-buzzing Central Line corridor from Cape Town station to Khayelitsha.
When disputes are “resolved” through violence it is a sign that the country’s democracy is under threat.
In the report, Matamba aptly sums up that beyond the lethal human harm, assassinations have a profound impact on the state, fuelling intraparty tension, corroding the criminal justice system through the assassination of whistle-blowers, for instance, and undermining democracy in general.
Criminals operate with impunity simply because they rarely get caught.
The country remains in the dark about the killers of popular rapper Kiernan Forbes/AKA in Durban. There are many others that have become cold cases.
While the police alone cannot solve the problem, they have to display that they are at least in control.
Police Minister Bheki Cele should know by now that the time for talk is long over.
Cape Times