Ramaphosa: ‘We had been doing something really wrong scaling back on security sector budgets’

President Cyril Ramaphosa has acknowledged that a reduction in security sector state funding, which crime analysts warned of over the years, was problematic and has promised change. 

Ramaphosa was replying to the state of the nation address (Sona) debate on Thursday.   

“From a budgetary point of view, I must say with humility, that we had been doing something really wrong scaling back on the budgets for our security sector. The defence force, police, prisons, the prosecutorial authorities and all that,” he said. 

The president said the government was changing this and had employed more police officers to boost SAPS human resource capacity. 

“This is the problem that we had to address over the years. Police minister Bheki Cele had said to me, ‘President our population has gone up and our people to police ratio has tamed.’ 

“Over the last five years, we have strengthened the fight against crime. In addition to the 20,000 new police recruits, we have established specialised SAPS economic infrastructure task teams to work with business, private security and state-owned enterprises to tackle illegal mining, construction site extortion, cable theft and vandalism of economic infrastructure.” 

Ramaphosa applauded Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi’s crime prevention wardens initiative dubbed AmaPanyaza.

Shortages in the SAPS has been a long-standing problem. According to the SAPS, in 2011 it had 193,892 employees which included 37,402 detective service employees. 

In the 2022 annual report, there were 176,180 employees, of which 37,246 were detective service employees. This was a decrease of 156 employees in the investigators' unit compared to 12 years ago when staff shortages had already been flagged. The number of police detectives remained the same for about 12 years.

In 2012, the police portfolio committee in parliament, with crime experts and police management, flagged the shortages as a major challenge in crime investigations. A report titled ‘the detectives’ dialogue’ was published with recommendations to address the problem. 

Last year, minister of police Bheki Cele in a written answer to parliament revealed that the majority of provinces still suffered from detective shortages. North West led with 32.8%, Northern Cape 25.9%, Western Cape 24.3%, Free State 23.7%, KwaZulu-Natal 23.3%, Limpopo 19.3%, Mpumalanga 14,3%, Eastern Cape 10.6% and Gauteng 5.2%. 

Independent crime analyst Dr Johann Burger contributed to the detective's report and previously told TimesLIVE not much was done to address the problem over the years.

“Then [2012] per detective had about 150-200 cases, which is an impossible workload to properly investigate each case.

“It is becoming worse because our crime levels have increased dramatically since 2011/2012, apart from 2020. The murder rate increased by 54% since 2011/2012 and aggravated robberies increased by more than 40%. 

“Despite that report with recommendations by parliament, very little, if anything, was done to solve the problem of detective shortages,” he said.

TimesLIVE