It was a terrible admission by a police minister, but an honest one. Most of his predecessors would have probably responded to the question with bravado — promising more boots on the ground and a kind of crackdown that would make the northern areas as peaceful as Shezhen and Chongqing in the People’s Republic of China.
But Firoz Cachalia, perhaps precisely because he is an acting police minister with no long-term ambition to stay in the cabinet, preferred to tell it like it is.
“I do not believe that we are currently in a position to defeat these gangs,” Cachalia told journalists gathered at the Gqeberha City Hall last week.
“They are on a killing spree in the Western Cape. There is a similar pattern in the Eastern Cape.”
He confined his answer to the two provinces because those were the two provinces he had been asked about.
But in reality, the problem is nationwide — the police are losing the battle against gangs and gang-driven crime and violence.
In fact, right now it feels like our police are losing the battle against all sorts of crime.
Cachalia is still too new in the job to take the blame, and we all know the circumstances under which President Cyril Ramaphosa was forced to rope him in, grabbing him as he was about to start his retirement from a professorship at Wits University.
But if we really want to understand why our national police service is losing the battle against crime, we need to look no further than the two dramas that are playing themselves out on our televisions, almost on a daily basis — the Madlanga commission and the parliamentary ad hoc committee.
The two processes were established by Ramaphosa and parliament, respectively, in response to damning allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi to the effect that senior police management, including the now suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu, were effectively working for criminal syndicates.
Almost every witness who has appeared before these two processes, whether they are on the side of Mkhwanazi or not, has given us more reason to believe that our police service is not only infiltrated, but has been captured by criminals.
This week, listening to the disheartening testimony of Major-General Lesetja Senona, the head of the Hawks in KwaZulu-Natal, one could not help but conclude that we have deployed a lot of wolves to look after the sheep and the results are devastating.
Senona, an experienced policeman with 36 years of service under his belt, saw nothing wrong with associating with a dubious “businessman” with a criminal record and who stands accused of serious criminal charges — Vusimuzi Matlala.
According to evidence presented before the commission, the two were not only close but Senona, a senior cop with the highest security clearance, shared confidential information, including ID numbers and cellphone details of police officers, with Matlala.
There are also serious questions surrounding Senono’s conduct around the strange disappearance of drugs that had been discovered during a police raid in Isipingo, south of Durban, some years ago.
The commission is still far from compiling its final report and we will only know then what the commissioners thought of Senona.
However, for most of the three days on the stand, there were moments where commissioners expressed frustration with his evasiveness and outright refusal to answer straightforward questions.
Although the interim report submitted by the Madlanga commission to the president in December has not been made public, it is encouraging to see that it is leading to some immediate action.
Ramaphosa yesterday issued a statement welcoming and accepting recommendations made in that interim report. Among the recommendations is the referral of a number of matters for immediate criminal investigation and urgent prosecution.
“President Ramaphosa expects all law enforcement agencies and other relevant criminal justice institutions to act with speed in implementing the recommendations of the commission’s interim report,” Ramaphosa’s office said in a statement.
Unsurprisingly, among the cases that have been referred for such investigations and prosecutions are those of Senona.
He is in the company of other high-ranking police officials including major-generals, brigadiers and a sergeant.
About nine officials from the Ekurhuleni Metro Police Department, including the now-infamous police chief Julius Mkhwanazi, have also been referred to the police and the prosecutions authority.
While all of this is progress — and certainly an improvement from the Zondo commission process which went on for years without any of the state capture functionaries being arrested — the reality is that the identified cops are just the tip of the iceberg.
To win the battle against criminal gangs terrorising our communities on the Cape Flats, the northern areas, in Mamelodi, Inanda and everywhere else, SA needs to clean out its rotten police service.
The bad apples need to be immediately suspended, investigated, prosecuted, convicted and fired.
That would send a strong message to their juniors that illegal conduct will not be tolerated in the police service.
Maybe then, fewer cops would render themselves agents of criminal syndicates. Maybe then, we will have a fighting chance to defeat gang violence and other forms of crime.