Hon Speaker, Mr President, certainly in the past month, we have seen the police shoot to kill an unarmed hairdresser, an unarmed food vendor and unarmed man cleaning his shoes, shot in the back of the head as he ran away, and a three-year-old baby in a car because the police said they thought he was armed.
The Constitutional Court has already, very carefully, reworked section 49, taking it from the odious apartheid era section to one that clearly gives police the right to shoot and kill armed criminals aiming a firearm at them or at others.
We've seen unprecedented police murders in the now-national Police Commissioner's province of KwaZulu-Natal, and he too was saying that section 49 would be a mandate to give police increased leniency to shoot. As the police already have this right to shoot armed criminals, obviously the fear in this country is that you - and this is still a great secret; we don't know what amendments you are proposing - are looking at going back to the days of allowing the police to shoot unarmed citizens in the back. That's what we are seeing today. Please, clarify that.