The new gazetted law may put more pressure on SAPS already ailing resources

The gazetted new draft regulations for public comment by the civilian secretariat, aimed at establishing a new council, regulator, and a host of new functions for the minister of police to protect the country’s critical infrastructure, is welcomed. However, any attempt to add more responsibility on the SAPS to deploy its resources to these environments, will add more woes to SAPS whose resources are already depleted beyond any measure.

Criminals aren’t only tearing the South African critical infrastructure such as Eskom, Railway, and roads, etc., but the lives and properties of all South Africans. This is also not happening because of the lack of the law, but because of the lack of implementation of the current law due to shortage of manpower and vehicles.

Crime has been an issue in South Africa for the past 4 years and not even showing any sign of coming down. In 2018, criminals planned road truck carnages with success and business industries were hugely affected by the damage. In July 2021 unrest, the same happened and lives and properties were lost. In July 2022, mass shootings, which are still taking place in our country right now, were carried out successfully and police are finding it difficult to trace and arrest the correct suspects. Current stats shows that kidnapping with the purpose of extorting money is on the rise. Police failures to deal with crime are attributed to shortage of manpower and vehicles.

Our members are currently working under very difficult conditions grappling with the challenge of load shedding which has so much impact on their safety. They don’t have sufficient manpower to look after their own police station which are robbed daily. SAPS is losing about 600 firearms per year due to their infrastructure which is not adequate to protect them. Apart from their safety, when electricity hits their arears, members are forced to use their own cellphone data to disseminate information to boots to the ground for them respond to complaints. These are efforts made by our members to service our communities. What are efforts done by the state to save South Africans from unrelenting crime?

Since Psira, which boast more than 500 000 members, is one of the minister of police portfolio, and SAPS force multiplier, IPUSA would like to call on him to enhance their capacity to protect those government identified critical infrastructure by this new draft regulations, as they did with National key Points. Acsa is a perfect example at the airports. There should also be proper co-ordination between these two departments.

If the department considers going ahead with this legislation, we propose that security companies be considered to guard this infrastructure. SAPS has sufficient capacity to investigate crime and allege one. Serious crimes will be referred to DPCI as is the norm now.

We call on all our members to participate in these draft regulations, which is in public for their comment. IPUSA will join in making those inputs.

Issued by IPUSA
President
Bethuel Nephtal Nkuna
072 741 7857
president@ipusa.org.za

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