Poor security supply a big part of state’s soft underbelly

In the eponymous movie about the deputy head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who gave the media crucial information about the US’s Watergate scandal, Mark Felt warns Time magazine reporter Sandy Smith that the FBI is coming apart because of the relentless attacks on the bureau by then president Richard Nixon’s White House.

“Do you want a country this big, this angry and this confused without a police department?” Felt asked. He might as well have been talking about SA.

The country’s security services are at their weakest in decades. Of course, the security services cannot solve the underlying causes of SA’s socioeconomic problems, including unemployment, poverty, crime and the collapse of public services. But they have a key role to play in keeping law and order. And law and order, which requires an effective state, matters for economic growth and development.

On that score, the words of Richard and Peggy Musgrave are apposite. They wrote in Public Finance in Theory and Practice that the public sector has an important and constructive role to perform rather than being, as had increasingly come to be the view, an unfortunate interference in the market.

“Though powerful as an instrument of social organisation, the market cannot perform all the functions that need to be met to achieve the economic and social goals of a democratic society. To accomplish that task a partnership with the public sector is needed, and this is precisely why an efficient conduct of the public sector is of such importance.”

One of the important roles of the public sector is the provision of security for citizens, both individuals and corporate. To demonstrate how bad the situation is, Investec disclosed last week that it would spend R2m a year on security for each of its executives based in SA. Many other companies have been paying quietly for the security of their executives for years.

The weakness of the security services is one of the country’s soft underbellies, and one that is magnified by SA having vast borders that have been leaking for years, enabling people from neighbouring countries, as well as other parts of the continent, to try their economic luck in SA.

The leaky borders, together with corrupt home affairs officials and police, have also allowed all manner of criminals to make nests in SA. Then there is the rising anger of locals as the economy’s growth rate slowed to below that of the growth in the population. All three layers of the state — national, provincial and municipal governments — are failing to provide basic public services.

The anger that has built up makes the poor and unemployed vulnerable to populist rhetoric. On top of all of this, the country has a long history of violence, as documented by its crime statistics. Even members of the governing party use murder and other forms of violence to settle political disputes.

Given this cocktail of an angry population, a state that is failing to provide basic public services and a country that has become a nest for criminals, SA desperately needs effective security services. But as the expert panel on the July 2021 riots found, SA’s security services, including the police and the intelligence agency, failed to co-ordinate their activities to prevent the violence. And when the violence started, the police were either absent or stood by as shops and other businesses were being looted or destroyed. In the end, the total bill for the looting, damage to property and disruption to economic activity came to R50bn.

It does not appear that the security services have mended their ways. A year after the July 2021 riots, police appeared inept at dealing with the recent violent protests in Thembisa, east of Johannesburg, and Kagiso to the west. The trigger for the protests in Thembisa was the Ekurhuleni municipality’s decision to adjust the amount of free electricity to residents. The people of Kagiso, on the other hand, are complaining about the failure of the police to protect them from gangsters linked to illegal mining activity in the area. A leaked army document showed that the SA National Defence Force has been put on standby for deployment to help the police restore law and order.

Clearly, fixing the security services should be priority number one for the government. A country twice the size of France that has become a favoured nest for blue- and white-collar criminals, and that has so many angry and hopeless citizens, some of whom have a penchant for destruction of property and other forms of violence, can ill afford not to have effective security services.