Chairperson, hon members, the strategic and operational plan of the SA Police Service for the next three years has been developed to focus on crime tendencies, flash point areas, threats and challenges identified in the intelligence estimate.
These include securing the local government elections and major events in our country; addressing extremist right-wing activities, urban terrorism and vigilantism; eradicating corruption; and making major inroads into organised crime relating to vehicle theft and hijacking, drug trafficking, bank robbery and the robbery of cash in transit, illegal plundering of our marine resources, money laundering, high-tech transnational crimes and cyber crime, commercial crime, illegal firearms and precious metals or stones.
Special attention is also being paid to violent crimes, including gang violence and social fabric crimes, with a specific focus on violence against women and children. The successful implementation of this strategic and operational plan hinges in the main on a tighter consolidation of the criminal justice system. That means the optimisation of intelligence-driven investigation and prosecution of crime, running hand in hand with an elaborate system of rehabilitation of offenders.
As part of this plan, a major service delivery improvement programme is being implemented to ensure that successes achieved in the short term are sustained in the medium to long term. This programme entails the development of our human resources, as well as channelling additional resources, both human and physical, to priority areas and units.
I am also convinced that improvement of the conditions of service of members of the SA Police Service will have a positive impact on the morale of members, and will ensure that we are able to retain highly skilled personnel. Discussions are currently being pursued with the relevant role- players to put in place strategies that must address and redress the overall situation in which members of SA Police Service have been operating. This is a serious matter that must be attended to with all the urgency it deserves.
Apart from a number of lateral entrants appointed to senior level, this financial year will also see the training of 1 200 new recruits. In addition, 600 civilians will be recruited to replace police officers performing administrative duties, so that these fully trained officials can be deployed to fight crime. Over and above these appointments, 600 individuals will be recruited to perform static guard duties, again releasing trained members to fight crime in the provinces. Three hundred new personnel will also be appointed to ensure the implementation of the strategy to deal with the proliferation of illegal firearms.
The majority of these members will be deployed to priority areas and within priority units to enhance the implementation of our operational strategy. We have decided that the detective service and crime intelligence will benefit most from these endeavours, since they play a major role in both our geographical and organised crime strategies.
In order to ensure operational efficiency and maximum community support, it is imperative that the SAPS must be representative of our country's demographics. The department's targets for achieving a more representative management cadre will be reached as soon as the senior posts recently advertised have been filled. In other words, 50% of all senior managers, that is director and above, will be from historically disadvantaged groups. At the level of provincial and divisional commissioner these targets have already been reached.
In the management echelons of the SAPS we now have 9% women at the level of director and above, as opposed to just 4% at the end of last year. We will continue to address gender representivity at all levels during subsequent rounds of appointments. Also for the first time in the history of policing in South Africa we have two women who have been appointed to the rank of divisional commissioner.
Since our members are also our greatest asset, we need to equip them properly, so that they can execute their responsibilities even more efficiently. We have accordingly provided for a substantial increase on the previous year's allocation for equipment. This will include the acquisition of force multipliers such as additional helicopters, scanner equipment at ports of entry and much-needed vehicles. We are providing for an increase of approximately 17%, in comparison to what we budgeted for in the previous year for the purchasing of vehicles.
All these initiatives are being reinforced by the assistance we are getting from the United States, which is training our Scorpions and middle- management police officers, the United Kingdom, where some Scorpion units are being trained, and the European Union, which is helping with funding for some of our human resource development projects. Precisely because of the nature of the enemy we are fighting and defeating, we have taken and implemented a decision, as a security cluster, to work together with the social and economic clusters, including the National Youth Commission, to ensure that learners stay in school, and that the resilience of youth at risk is improved against both victimisation and being offenders.
Again, in a shared leadership role with the Minister of Health, we as a cluster are consolidating a national multidepartmental strategy to deal with the hideous crime of rape. Our focus is on prevention, victim empowerment, investigation, prosecution, court management, offender rehabilitation and partnerships with civil society. The strategy will also impact positively on other crimes against women and children.
All these successes notwithstanding, the problem of continued assassinations and political intolerance in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and in particular the KwaNongoma-Ulundi area, where cowboyism and lawlessness seem to be a culture of their own, needs to be addressed frontally. The police can no longer on their own be a cutting edge against that rampant hooliganism where members and supporters of political parties hoard and brandish firearms of all sorts to slaughter one another, and where members of the SA Police Service are chased away from scenes of crime. The problem cannot be simply a matter of policing. The political parties in that province, that is the IFP and the ANC in the main, will have to close ranks and together fight in the front trenches to mobilise their members and supporters against politically motivated violence and crime.
Whilst it is true that at national level relations between these two parties are good, the same cannot be said at the lower echelons. This situation must be tackled immediately, and once that is done the senseless slaughter will come to an end. Otherwise the verdict of impartial history will be extremely harsh against these two parties.
Similarly, in the Western Cape the taxibus violence will not be resolved by members of the SA Police Service. The impassioned appeal by the provincial legislature for the police and SANDF to intervene smacks of the kind of response that one experienced in the heyday of apartheid racism. The taxibus violence, which has left many people dead and children orphaned, is a symptom of a fundamental weakness in the provincial coalition. And that weakness is the reluctance of the New NP and its DP ally to cross the threshold into the new democratic era. They remain trapped in the twilight of a past in which those African and coloured townships were just peripheries of deprivation and denial.
The police have specific, clear instructions on dealing with any criminal activity in affected areas. The maintenance of law and order and the provision of safety and security to communities are the responsibilities of the police. It does not help to prattle that commuters have a democratic right to choose their mode of transport when the political parties in power refuse to level the relevant field where that democratic choice is to be exercised. Members should please help the police help the commuters. One should not plead for their deployment to solve problems that this province's government is shy to attend to.
The Independent Complaints Directorate has come of age. At the completion of its third year of operation the ICD managed to register a physical presence in all of the country's provinces. This is a source of great pride, taking into consideration the hurdles which it had to overcome to be where it is today.
The presence of the ICD in the provinces is part of a strategy to promote accessibility by members of the public to the services which it provides. Hon delegates are therefore urged to bring this information to the attention of their constituencies so that members of the public may also assist the ICD in its efforts to promote proper police conduct.
It is also the desire of the ICD to forge links beyond the borders of South Africa into the SADC region. The ICD would be ready to co-operate with these countries with regard to the concept of civilian oversight of law enforcement.
It will be recalled that the executive director of the ICD resigned at the end of April this year, thus necessitating the appointment of an acting executive director. I wish to inform the House that in the interests of transparency, the position of executive director of the ICD will be advertised shortly. The House will be informed as soon as the appointment of the new executive director has been made. The ICD is committed to eradicating existing pockets of police crime, without fear or favour. But it is also co-operating with the SAPS in the interests of assisting it with its job of transformation. One example of this co-operation is the formation of a task team for the purpose of developing a strategy for the reduction of deaths in police custody, and deaths as a result of police action. This task team comprises key stakeholders, such as the ICD, the SA Police Service and some NGOs.
In conclusion, the ICD is in the process of forging stronger partnerships with the SA Police Service, the secretariat, the Ministry and the cluster, on whose behalf I am speaking right now as a whole, and, of course, civil society, for the purpose of assisting in the fight against crime. [Applause.]