Gun Law in SA

ONE of SA’s most incisive writers, R W Johnson, recently wrote this piece on the SA crime havoc in the London Sunday Times:

"The causes of this lawlessness include a hopelessly ineffective, undertrained and underpaid police force, a collapsing justice system that routinely fails to convict criminals and lets murders out on bail, overcrowded cells and jails from which 100 prisoners escape each week and several ill-judged amnesties: most recently of 9 000 convicts on Mandela’s birthday. Blaming the police seems hardly fair. 1 015 policemen have been murdered since 1994, more than half of them off-duty.

"They are, say the police indignantly, ‘being hunted like game.’ Little wonder that one often hears of robbery tip-offs when police kill an entire gang, with none captured or wounded. Few doubt that such events are anything other than executions.

"Some of the most chilling crimes have been the murderous attacks on farms that have killed 556 farmers and members of their families in the past four years. One recent attack on the farm of Christo and Dinah Buys in KwaZulu/Natal caused particular trauma among their neighbours. As two armed men began to shoot and smash their way in, Buys managed to send a Mayday signal on the farm radio.

"’We could hear the entire terrible thing happening live on radio as we sat listening in our own farm kitchen,’ said a horrified farmer’s wife. ‘We could hear the whole thing for 2½ hours . . . the dying people groaning, the screams and shouts, the farm watch arriving ten minutes after the shooting, describing the scene with the bodies lying around and Mrs Buys dying in the ambulance.

"’People on farms all around were listening, crying and praying - and, I can tell you, vowing vengeance.’

"The government does not like articles about crime appearing in the foreign press, claiming that they give South Africa a bad name.

For example, Thabo Mbeki, the deputy president, has claimed that the crime wave is the work of a hidden ‘third force’ attempting to destabilise the country - a view nobody takes seriously.

"Dullah Omar, the Minister of Justice, clearly feels his top priority is to replace seasoned White prosecutors with affirmative action Blacks, even though this has arguably contributed to the virtual collapse of the justice system.

"Most remarkably, Sydney Mufamadi, the Minister of Law and Order, seems shy of finding himself on the same side as the police. No sooner had the Planet Hollywood bomb gone off in Cape Town last month than he announced that this was the work of right-wing forces nostalgic for apartheid. Despite the prevailing world opinion that the bomb was the work of Muslim extremists, Mufamadi has got the cabinet to adopt this bizarre view. Mufamadi, a leading communist,

"The government does not like articles about crime appearing in the foreign press, claiming that they give South Africa a bad name."

gives theimpression that his preoccupation lies less in fighting crime than in trying to lay the blame for it on those he dislikes politically.

"South African society is far too wild for such posturing to count. Last month eight criminals robbed a warehouse belonging to an Asian businessman in Estcourt. The owner, with his security guards and friends, went out hunting for the robbers, killing five of them in two hours. This happened in front of the police, who did nothing.

"Spitfire Dhlamini, the mayor of Estcourt, wrote to the local paper the following week, congratulating the businessman, and saying that with actions such as his, Estcourt would at last be free. No doubt much the same sentiments were expressed in Dodge City."

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