Chairperson; my Police Minister, Minister Nhleko; all Ministers and Deputy Ministers present here; the chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Police, hon Beukman; hon Members of Parliament; all MECs from the provinces; the National Commissioner of Police, Mme Phiyega; the Secretary of Police; the Executive Director of Ipid, Ntate McBride; chairperson of the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority, Psira, and the Psira leadership present here; members of Community Policing Forums, CPFs; our distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen, our greatest icon, the late former President Nelson Mandela, once said:
Our achievements, as the ANC-led government, are very significant. We often fail to claim our victories. At the same time, however, it is the mark of a serious political movement and government that we are prepared to be open, honest, and self-critical where necessary.
Today, on behalf of the SA Police Service, SAPS, we, as the Ministry of Police, arise in front of all South Africans to proclaim that our organisation, the SA Police Service, supported by the ANC-led government, has indeed for the past 20 years continued to fulfil and immediately fix where it fails its constitutional mandate. [Applause.]
Therefore, we will not be apologetic about the strides that the Department of Police has made thus far. Together with the police and the people of South Africa, we are to move South Africa forward and unite all South Africans against all types of crime. We will not be ashamed to admit where we have not done very well. Most importantly, we will show vividly how we as the SA Police Service have been intervening to remedy those faults and shortcomings.
The President has made two critical calls in accordance with our electoral mandate: We need to accelerate the implementation of radical socioeconomic transformation; and central to this radical transformation agenda is the prioritisation of youth empowerment and employment.
We all know that more than 20 years ago, when our young black youth wanted to join the police force, they were refused solely because they did not have, amongst others, a driver's licence. This strict requirement discriminated against these young people, in particular those who came from rural communities, who wished and had great potential to be good police officers.
We can now announce that the department has taken a conscious decision to waive the driver's licence as a requirement for enlistment in the SAPS for 10% of the new recruits. In addition, all members of the SA Police Service are now supported in order to get driver's licences, through the SAPS/Sasseta K53 Driver Training Programme, for the first time since 1913. [Applause.] This is done at the SAPS Benoni and Bishop Lavis SAPS Academies, which are also testing stations for the SA Police Service.
In this regard, we wish to convey our sincerest appreciation to the Safety and Security Sector Education and Training Authority, Sasseta, and our progressive businesspeople, like Mr Mpengesi, who have partnered with the SA Police Service to train about 1 000 members in the 2013-2014 financial year. One thousand five hundred more will be trained in the 2014-2015 financial year. I am talking about training to drive, because in some instances we complain about not having resources, like cars, at police stations. However, when you visit police stations you would see a lot of cars parked outside. The problem is that when some of these youngsters were recruited into the Police Service, they did not have driver's licences. They had to get them in any way they could in order for them to be enlisted into the Police Service.
As a result, when you give them a vehicle to drive to a scene, they would take something like 30 to 40 minutes just to reach a destination 5 minutes away because of the fact that they cannot drive properly. The SA Police Service leadership always aligns itself with the conscience and soul of the nation, one that is desperately seeking employment and a better life in South Africa.
Currently, the SA Police Service has over 40 000 reservists. Under normal circumstances reservists are meant to be full-time workers who are employed somewhere else, who from time to time would volunteer their time to work for and support the SA Police Service in their operations. However, the reality of the matter is that 90% of the reservists that we currently have are unemployed and thus depend solely on the stipends and incentives they get from local police stations. In some instances they receive stipends from local MECs' offices.
As mandated by the Minister of Police to oversee the administration and visible policing programmes of the SA Police Service, I actively support the notion that no reservist who has a good standing in terms of the law will be thrown out into the streets. It is for this reason that the Minister and I support the SAPS' reservist pilot project, thanks to the Premier of the Free State, Premier Magashule, who came up with this concept when a female doctor was raped two years ago at the Pelonomi Hospital and it was revealed that the perpetrators were non-South Africans.
We are done a disservice by the private security industry at times in that they employ people who are not registered in the country's database. That makes it very difficult for our police to apprehend perpetrators as they are nonregistered foreign individuals. Thank you very much for that idea.
This project solely concerns itself with retraining the reservists as security guards at government buildings instead of using unknown and unvetted security guards. So far 1 572 reservists, to be precise, have been recruited and retrained and they are all employed under the Public Service Act, not under the South African Police Service Act.
Moving forward with this pilot project, we will further engage and invite other sister departments to partner with the SA Police Service so that all these 40 000-plus reservists are retrained and employed as security guards for government buildings, and to secure the outskirts of big malls, amongst others. So, we will have to revisit the current national instruction on the revised reservist system and rectify issues of criteria.
The partnership that the SA Police Service forged with the Department of Basic Education in 2011 has indeed become the epitome and illustrator of the ethos of the "Together we move South Africa forward" strategy of the SA Police Service.
After the formal protocol was launched on 6 August 2013, we have this far visited five provinces, starting with my own province, of course, the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Eastern Cape and Mpumalanga. In the process, we brought various stakeholders and government departments together to roll out the school safety community outreach programmes in provinces.
This programme is helping to raise awareness amongst children and young learners regarding crime and violence, substance abuse, Satanism, and other social ills, and their impact on individuals, families and their education. We will also be strengthening community sectors with the tools to hold us accountable and to ensure that this SAPS Schools Safety Outreach Programme becomes effective and sustainable.
I will be approaching and requesting the Minister of Monitoring and Evaluation to assist us with the development of a user-friendly monitoring tool to quickly remedy the teething problems encountered in the roll-out of this programme, especially around our environment at school.
In the same vein, these past 20 years have taught us that the challenges that we still face as government and as a department are as great as ever. We do acknowledge the challenges that we come across, as government in general, and as the SA Police Service in particular.
We thus wholeheartedly commit ourselves, as the Department of Police, to the National Development Plan: Vision 2030 to proactively tackle our challenges head-on and without fear. I can safely say in this House and to the public at large that without this NDP Vision 2030 we as the SA Police Service would have not been able to identify, articulate and remedy our mistakes and flaws. [Interjections.]
I think that most of the issues have been alluded to by the Minister. Let me use my few remaining minutes to respond to some of the issues that were raised by people who do not understand what is happening. Unfortunately, it is due to the nature of the environment that we live in. Some people live somewhere in Sandton or whatever.
Thina sihlala elokishini. [We stay in the townships.]
When we talk about crime, we are talking about something that we know how it occurs.
Modulasetulo, re tseba ka ho utlwa ka letlalo; ha re bo tsebe ka ho bo bala. O utlwe ho thwe botlokotsebe mona; botlokotsebe mane!
Ho a makatsa hore kajeno lena e be leloko le hlomphehang la DA le tlo bua ka hore - ha ke batle ho bua ka tsa Letona. Letona le tla ikarabella. (Translation of Sesotho paragraphs follows.)
[Chairperson, we have first-hand experience; we don't know it just from reading about it. We hear about crime happening here and crime happening over there!
It is amazing what the hon member of the DA is talking about today. I don't even want to mention the Minister. The Minister will speak for himself.]
I am going to talk particularly about crime in this province. Instead of the police being supported by the DA in this province, they are not supported. Hence, you discover that each and every month we have more than five police officers killed in this province ... [Interjections.] ... because of the fact that they do not get support from the government of this province. Instead of wasting money on a commission somewhere in Langa, take that money and support the police in fighting crime. [Interjections.] [Applause.]