Hon member,
fortunately I am sitting here with a co-convenor of the JCPS Cluster. The Justice, Crime Prevention and Security, JCPS Cluster sits on a regular basis and on the agenda of the JCPS Cluster are
discussions of some of the threats to national security including border management and border control. In other words, we are striving as much as it is possible to ensure that we work together as a cluster. Each entity within the cluster is well informed about possible threats and challenges which are currently confronting.
You are correct, if in the Department of Home Affairs there are challenges and those challenges must definitely impact on the work of the Department of Defence and Military Veterans. Equally, if our department itself is not well capacitated, that impacts negatively on the work of the police even internally in the country because you know that with regards to the police, they have a responsibility of law enforcement. Sometimes, maybe unfairly so, people will say that the people who are committing some of the crimes which are being committed are foreign nationals. That really has to do in the main with stereotypes that whoever commits a crime cannot be a South African but in actual fact, it is South Africans as well.
Where it creates difficulty for the police is the fact that, for instance, you do not even have fingerprints of some of these people. The people are undocumented and these would have been people who have crossed into the border line without documents. There is no biometrics which assist the police in the event that they were to
arrest them. They cannot even identify them whether they are regular offenders or first time offenders. There is nothing that you can do about it.
However, in our instance, we have 22 companies which are supposed to be deployed on the borderline and currently we stand at 15. We took a decision, two or three years ago that by now we would be having about 22 companies on the borderline. Unfortunately, you cannot deploy 22 companies on the borderline when you do not have resources to do so. Everything is being done to work together with the Treasury and the Presidency. We are doing this as a cluster to talk about how best to inject finances into the cluster so that we can maximise and enhance our work of national security. Thank you, Chairperson.
Question 5: