Chairperson, Minister, Deputy Minister, hon members, congratulations firstly to the Minister and Deputy Minister. You have a lot of hard work ahead of you, which we will be more than happy to assist you with if you will allow us to.
I have been encouraged in our portfolio committee meetings at the incisive questioning, and if we all share that commitment to solving the crime problem in the country that will be the best legacy we can leave from this term of Parliament.
It is a sad and unacceptable fact that hardly a day goes by without us hearing of yet another abduction, rape, or murder of one of our children. The Weekend Argus recently reported that new case numbers increased by more than 100% between 2007 and 2008. According to a Solidarity Union study, as recently reported, one child is raped every three minutes in South Africa, and every day three children are murdered.
I believe that it is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, tasks of this portfolio committee to address this issue in a meaningful and effective way. Whilst the budget for the portfolio as a whole has increased, this does not necessarily translate into effective crime-combating measures.
What we really need now to combat this scourge is the reintroduction of the specialised family violence, child protection and sexual offences, FCS, units, which are properly resourced and located away from police stations, with properly trained personnel running them. It has been proven the world over that specialised units are the most effective way of dealing with sexual offences and offences against children. We are, therefore, very pleased to hear the Minister's statements in this regard today.
However, the way the budget has been allocated does not provide for this, and the annual police plan targets do not indicate that we are really serious. One has to wonder if the SAPS really are serious, when their target in the annual police plan is a detection rate of 40% for crimes against women, a target of 42% for crimes against children, and their target for the conviction rate in respect of all contact crimes is only 15%. That means that 60% and 58% of crimes against women and children respectively can go undetected, and the SAPS will be able to pat themselves on the back and say they have met their targets. Madam Chairperson, this cannot be right.
If we are really as concerned as we say we are, as the President has said he is in the state of the nation address, and as the DA certainly is, then we need to introduce these units immediately. That is my first challenge to the new Minister. We can have as many strategies and special days and campaigns as we like, but if we do not have the correctly qualified people in the right places to do the right jobs, all our good intentions will not change a thing. Please, reintroduce the child protection units, CPUs, and sexual offences units as a matter of the utmost urgency.
The Minister will undoubtedly ask where the money is to come from for all this. Firstly, it is not necessarily only a question of money, obviously, but of management. However, the first step would be to identify wastages in the directorates, and a good starting point in searching for some extra funding is the Secretariat for Safety and Security.
Apart from the fact that it appears from the portfolio committee briefings that they are performing functions not in their legislative mandate, we noted with interest that one of their statutory functions is to advise the Minister in the exercise of his or her powers. So, the question is: Is it the secretariat who has been advising the Minister not to publish crime statistics until they are long-forgotten history, or did he decide that against their advice? Either way, the secretariat is clearly ineffective. Their ineffectiveness is further borne out when one looks at their performance figures. Their greatest success appears to be in organising izimbizo. They wish to allocate the pathetic sum of R15 000 for evaluating the catastrophic implementation of the Firearms Control Act by the SAPS.
However, the most concerning part is the composition of the staff. The department has a total staff of 37. Of these, four are directors, at a salary of R2,5 million per annum each. We then have four deputy directors, at just under R1,4 million each, three assistant directors at just under R700 000 each and another five assistant directors at just under R900 000 each. What more value they add than the other three, I have no idea. Thus a total of 43% of the staff are directors. Who are they directing? Given the number of staff to actually do the work, it is a wonder they even managed their astounding feat of meeting 5 out of their 19 performance targets for the past financial year! There were 4 targets where it could not even be said from their report whether they were met or not, which is in itself an indictment, but even if they were, that means 16 directors, constituting 43% of the department, managed to meet 47% of their targets.
According to the figures presented to the portfolio committee, of the R12 million allocated this year to the secretariat, R9 million, or 75% of that, will be for salaries. Minister, this department clearly does not merit its existence. Please, look at scrapping it entirely or making the directors earn their salaries. We cannot afford to have people wasting money while others are dying.
Lastly, my colleague has already spoken out many times about the huge increases in funding for the VIP protection units, which don't need extra funding. This is the one unit that has actually pretty much fulfilled all their targets. So, I will not go into further detail about that, but I would like to make one simple plea today: let us make our children the VIPs. Thank you. [Applause.]