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Some perspicacious journalist mentioned a while back that President Ramaphosa of South Africa often approaches the problems and shambles his party created with a feigned surprise. He says he is “shocked” at what he finds here and there, at places to which he is either directed or because the press has highlighted yet another calamity. He is reactive. He never takes ownership of the country’s deterioration. He watched (and watches) the general SA decline with an equanimity that would have any employee in any company in South Africa facing instant dismissal. Any CEO or his designate  would have seen a problem coming and would have corrected it. This is management, and one witnesses it every day in the successes of the farming, retail, manufacturing and mining industries of South Africa, to mention just a few. This management ability and all its salient aspects is entirely missing in the state president, his party and all those party loyalists masquerading as “civil servants”, appointed by the president under his affirmative action policy.

This is why they are failures. They refer to “challenges” even when obvious problems have not been attended to for years. These become permanent challenges. This neglect has caused almost intractable damage to South Africa: the lazy and incoherent mindsets never change, despite overwhelming evidence of constant malfunction. One wonders whether we will ever get the country right again. We are facing such entrenched mental recalcitrance that extricating ourselves from its pernicious effect seems a long way off. But extricate we must.

HOW THE WORLD SEES US – CRIME, GANGS, VIOLENT CITIES AND DRUG TRAFFICKING. HOW DID WE GET TO THIS?

We are here because the ANC government transported us to top crime levels in the world, and neither the president nor the ANC did anything to stop this ascent to notoriety. South Africa ranks very high globally for crime, and several SA cities are in the world’s top 10 – 20 for both ”perceived” crime and actual murder rates.  South Africa is ranked 5th globally in Numbeo’s 2026 crime index, with a score of 74.55. Only Papua New Guinea, Venezuela, Haiti and Afghanistan rank higher.

(Numbeo is the world’s biggest crowd-sourced database for quality-of-life data.  Based in Serbia, it has a crime index which ranks 400 + cities around the world on “perceived” crime – mugging, safety in walking at night, car theft, etc. This is where Pietermaritzburg is number one on the list. Pretoria is number 2, and Johannesburg is number 5. This perception is based on reports from residents and their attitude to their surroundings.)

When it comes to homicides – murders – figures are reported from the Mexican Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice which uses actual police murder data per 100 000 people.

Using the Mexican Council’s figures for 2026, Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) ranked third as the most violent city in the world for 2025, with a record of 119.8 murders per100,000 people. That’s double the average for the world’s top 50 cities. Cape Town ranked 12th globally, Durban ranked 15th and Johannesburg 34th. These of course are reported homicides. We can regard certain parts of South Africa as “out of bounds” with respect to reporting murders.

In the current TV repeat of the program ”Trafficked” with Mariane van Zeller, (filmed in 2024), she reports on Cape Town’s drug industry where hitmen are paid R25 000 for killing someone (mostly people they don’t know), where assassination is a business, and where sometimes 30 killings a night by one hit man doesn’t even warrant a call to the police station.

These hit men all control certain turf and they are protected by a plethora of bodyguards. Killing Is a way of life. “I don’t know what else to do”, said many who were simply not prepared to join a society based on the rule of law and hard work for a salary. These assassinations and gang violence are still taking place within the precincts of municipal Cape Town, recently judged as the most beautiful city in the world for tourism.

THE ABSENCE OF MANAGEMENT IS THE KEY TO FAILURE

Where was president Ramaphosa when all of this was happening? These shenanigans  were all over social media, all over the newspapers, all over the TV. Isn’t he supposed to be the “manager” of South Africa? Doesn’t he check things?  Isn’t it his duty to “nip in the bud” any nascent crime or inefficiency or malfeasance that may affect the country?

A bit late in the day to try and fix something that wasn’t spotted years ago, but spotted or not, the president hasn’t made any effort to stop the rot that has occurred within SA’s  blue line against crime, the SA Police Service (SAPS), except to institute a commission of enquiry, one of his favourite methods of dodging responsibility. Let us not forget that it was from within the police force itself (KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt. Gen. Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi) who lifted the lid on the corruption crippling the SAPS.  The president apparently never spotted it as a growing cancer. If he did, he let it fester. So much for management.

Before the recent G20 visit, the ANC mayor of Johannesburg asked the president of this same ANC to “please fix Johannesburg”. It’s like asking the fox to “fix” the hen house he’s just destroyed.

A bit of housekeeping here and there resulted, but the “manager” of South Africa, president Ramaphosa, took no action to help Johannesburg out of its quicksand because he can’t - he had appointed the incompetents under his cadre deployment policy, and neither he nor his inefficient loyalists had the faintest idea how to or whether to fix Johannesburg. No hard decisions taken. No heads were rolling. The president’s inherent reluctance to face a problem head on has become his trademark. It is an art form. Yet his promises to look into the “challenges” are still effective, at least to those still seduced by a mellifluous voice and a look of sincerity. There’s always the tried and tested commission of enquiry, closely followed by the task force. The problem usually ends on he back burner.

PROMISES, PROMISES!

But the SA government didn’t bank on Lt. Gen. Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, KZN police commissioner who blew the lid off police corruption last year, corruption that had been festering for years under the ANC ‘s and president Ramaphosa’s watch.

Despite his comforting words and gratuitous assurances, none other than Police Minister Senzo Mchunu’s has fallen from grace:  he has been on “special leave” since July, 2025, at a salary of R2,69 million a year or R224,166 a month. This was increased by 3,8% in April 2026.

On 15 August 2024 Minister Mchunu declared that the police would focus on a “new will  and a new dynamic in its fight against crime” in the areas where the country’s top 30 police stations are situated. These crimes include murder, rape, assaults, robberies, vehicle theft and transit heists and the areas are Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban. He was replying to a parliamentary question concerning high crime rates in these districts.  In conjunction with other state departments within the government’s recently formed National Policing Strategy (NPS), the fight against crime will be won, he declared. The police had also created an Increased Crime Prevention and Combatting Action Plan within the NPS. Together with the other arms of government, crime would be defeated.

A few days later, on 23 August, 2024, the minister said he wanted to bring former detectives back to the force. Even though 201 of these detectives had already returned,  a further push was needed to bring back more “experienced” personnel. According to figures at the time, there were 8,594 detective vacancies country wide.

Police spokesman at the time Brig.(sic) Athlenda Mathe said that it was national police commissioner General Fannie Masemola’s priority to “improve capacity” of the current interns. (Virtually impossible because of president Ramaphosa’s cadre deployment policies, where political loyalists were deployed instead of qualified people to crucial positions in the law and order portfolio.)

On 3 October 2024, Minister Mchunu bragged that the police can ”win” over crime. He and top police officials had set up an “effective action plan”. He admitted that gang warfare had increased in Gauteng and the Western Cape. He said the police wanted to “destroy” the illegal weapons floating around South Africa, and that he wanted to “professionalise” the police. Commissioner Fannie Masemola mentioned in the same press report that something called “Operation  Shanela” had started up as a “better action plan”.

THE MADLANGA COMMISSION OF ENQUIRY

So what have we now? What are the results of all the talk and task forces and action plans proffered as part of the crime fighting efforts by the SA Police Service? The “Judicial Commission of Enquiry into Criminality, Political Interference and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System” (known as the Madlanga Comission) was established on 21 July 2025 by president Ramaphosa after allegations made by Lt.Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi on 6 July 2025. The hearing actually started on 17 September, but Minister Mchunu was suspended in July, 2025. Clearly allegations against him warranted this action by the president.  It is alleged that Minister Mchunu was influenced to disband the province’s political killing task force to benefit crime suspects. So he was telling us how his SAPS was fighting crime while he was allegedly encouraging the crime!

As well Commissioner of Police Fannie Masemola was summoned on 25 March 2026 to appear in court over the R360 million Medicare24 Tshwane district tender: he faces four counts of violating the Public Finance Management Act. On 23 April the president placed him on “precautionary suspension”. These two Ramaphosa deployments  were certainly not practising what they preached!

Both of these two gentlemen are effectively “out of action” (full pay of course!). What happened to the task forces and the crime fighting and the “winning” over lawlessness?

Who is responsible for the thousands (maybe millions) of firearms that have been stolen from police stations, or that have been smuggled into the country, many of which have been sold to criminal gangs by, inter alia, the police? Acting Police Minister Feroz Cachalia promised a full report on this matter on 15 January 2026. Nobody has said a word about the fact that it has to date not been issued.

And police crime dockets? In the last financial year (2024), 2,04 million new dockets were opened, 1,93 million were closed. Only 780 000 cases were solved. On 10 May 2024, the opposition Democratic Alliance made application under the Promotion of Access to Information Act of 2000 (PAIA) regarding the closing of 5.4 million police case dossiers under the watch of former police minister Bheke Cele.
On 7 August 2024, the then current minister Senzo Mchunu furnished the DA with a detailed breakdown.

These figures for 2018/9 to 31 December 2023 were:

76,655 murder cases, 40,089 attempted murder, 141,026 assault with grievous bodily harm, 256,162 aggravated robbery, 61,740 rape, 5,523 sexual assault and 9,114 kidnapping. 9,114, inter alia.

Over ten years, the SAPS opened 21,497,020 cases, and 8,050,088 were solved. 13,264,019 were closed without resolution. That is a clearance rate of only 37,5%. At the end of 2025, there were still 1,9 million cases opened and under investigation. These are the cases “lying in wait” on detectives’ desks.

A FOOTNOTE TO THIS REPORT is to compare how a civilized country’s government reacts to citizens’ complaints about something as relatively minor as illegal dumping. Within a short period after his appointment as British prime minister, Andy Burnham set in motion a package of strong action under the Crime and Policing Act of 2026 which involved  more powers against waste dump criminals . These included strong fines, more powers to municipal mayors to curtail dumping via arrests, and immediate clean-up funding for 3 of the worst sites. On 4 August 2026 four persons were arrested for environmental, fraud and money laundering offences linked to illegal dumping. Burnham moved quickly to eradicate this blight from the British countryside. He even used AI powered drones. He didn’t shuffle the problem to a commission of enquiry.

Comparisons are odious, as the saying goes. We rest our case.