EDITORS COMMENT
Of challenges and doing things differently in 2020 “The same procedure as every year, James!”
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catchphrase from Dinner for One, the black and white comedy classic synonymous with New Year’s Eve celebrations all over the world, has worked its way into everyday vocabulary since first being aired in the early 1960s. Funny and often quoted though it is, it’s a line that portends disaster in real-life South Africa if we continue doing things the same way as we’ve been doing them. 2020, anticipated by the optimistic and dreaded by the cynical, has the potential to be the year that is remembered as a new dawn, a turning point, an example to the rest of the world of what courage, accountability and vision can do. Certainly, there’s no shortage of naysayers who believe that not much is going to change for the good in our beautiful but crime-wracked country with its struggling economy and unreliable power supply. Popular sentiment is running the gamut from hardened cynicism to hopeful optimism, and the facts of the matter are underpinned by, among other things, a steady stream of people who are selling up and emigrating to other, safer lands. February 2020 will mark two years since South Africa elected Cyril Ramaphosa as its president. His promise of a new dawn resonated with a public desperate for honourable, accountable leadership and he quickly established a number of commissions of inquiry to investigate “the rot that had engulfed South Africa for many years” to quote Bonang Mohale, CEO of Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA), as reported by SABC.com. A year later, in February 2019, career advocate Shamila Batohi was appointed as National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP), another critically important position
in terms of getting South Africa out of its criminal mire.
Cause for hope Pieter du Toit of News24 reported in November 2019 that the head of the National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) Investigative Directorate, Hermione Cronje, had told journalists that “an enormous amount of work dividing cases into priority areas and work streams had been done over the last couple of months and that the public would soon see it come to fruition.” Aware of South Africa’s growing impatience around an apparent lack of headway regarding high level state capture prosecutions, Batohi promised in an IOL article by Shaun Smillie that “heads were going to roll” in 2020. Smillie wrote of “developments that give cause for hope” including the appearance in court on bribery charges of former State Security Minister Bongani Bongo, the arrest of four men (“including a former Eskom group executive”) on charges of fraud and corruption, and 10 arrests in the Eastern Cape on charges of toilet tender fraud. Columnist and author Mandy Wiener, in a January 2020 article on News 24, says Batohi and Cronje are aware of the public’s mounting expectations but that getting “the crooks and cronies behind state capture into the dock and into orange overalls through convictions” is not a simple process. “Prosecutors need cast iron evidence that will hold up in court,” she wrote, adding: “Yet despite apparently insurmountable challenges, action appears to be happening.” In his 2020 New Year message, President Ramaphosa gave the assurance that public institutions and law enforcement agencies were being rebuilt and the fight against state capture and corruption was advancing.
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SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA JANUARY 2020
Perhaps the challenge to end all challenges is Eskom with its R450 billion (and mounting) debt and never-ending pleas for permission to increase electricity tariffs. How its newly- elected CEO Andre de Ruyter is going to fix the nightmare that is Eskom is anyone’s guess but he’s up for the challenge, which is hopeful. I’m no economist, but I suggest that the country’s fortunes – or current lack thereof – will improve to some degree once the process to repair Eskom is visibly underway. From a security industry perspective, 2020 is also going to bring with it a number of challenges, some new, others legacy. This month’s personality profile Nhlanhla Khuzwayo, MD of Security Services at Servest, sees load shedding and the economy as key issues; Danny Pringle of Secutel is concerned about unstable communication infrastructures, and Tony Botes, national administrator of SASA (Security Association of SA) highlights the hardy annual that is non-compliance along with the hope that the (relatively) new National Bargaining Council for the Private Security Sector (NBCPSS) will kick up a few gears with regard to curtailing criminality within the industry. Something else to consider: as one of the country’s major employers, the private security sector is likely to be besieged by post matriculants in 2020. Of the roughly 500 000 learners who completed school last year and with unemployment sitting at around 29 per cent, many of them are going to be looking for jobs wherever they can find them. Additional challenges for 2020 include bolstering numbers in our police force, clamping down on gang warfare and violent crime and resolving the land restitution issue. “We know only too well the enormity of the challenges that confront us, but we are united in the knowledge that we have the means and the determination to overcome them,” concluded President Ramaphosa in his 2020 New Year message. I hope so.
Ingrid Olivier
Editor ingridolivier@idotwrite.co.za
securityfocusafrica.com
