Promoting A Secure South Africa
- Douglas Chase
- Oct 1, 2019
- 3 min read
My close friend and business partner challenged my thoughts recently... You need to understand that my friend has massive aspirations and dreams for the future of South Africa and that positivity is quite contagious. He challenged me to write about what it will take to promote a safer and more secure South Africa. This question shouldn't be challenging for a security adviser right? The level to which this question challenged my thinking was disturbing, the reality is that many of us complain about the security situation in our country but we have not spent much time trying to come up with workable and sustainable solutions.
We have the age old question: should our security efforts be focused on proactive measures or reactive measures.
Reactive measures are critical in security however they have a severe limiting factor in that they have limited power:
Our armed security elements may not shoot at suspects (therefore the additional costs of weapons seems futile)
Forensic investigation processes within SAPS limit our ability to obtain admissible evidence
Successful prosecutions are difficult to obtain
Poor quality installations of security technology systems e.g. cctv, alarms etc
Sub-standard performance by security service providers
Rehabilitation of offenders does not adequately prepare them for reintegration into society and therefore perpetuates the cycle of crime
Pro-active measures seem to be the obvious solution but are often challenging to address therefore it is easier to avoid dealing with. What are the proactive areas that need to be addressed:
Professionalizing the private security industry
Raising security awareness among communities
Creating sustainable employment
Holding security service providers to account
Addressing the psychological needs of individuals that are impacted by four generations of people that have experienced severe trauma and continue to suffer
Education regarding the abuse of women and children
These are broad ideas and the list is not exhaustive but its an illustration to bring me to my next point. There are many different organisations that are trying to address different aspects of what appears to be the solution e.g. NGOs providing counselling and social work services, organisations addressing unemployment, the Private Security Industry Regulating Authority monitoring compliance in the private security industry.
These organisations are too numerous to mention and many of them are doing excellent work. If these organisations exist then why do we still have an upward spiral of crime related incidents and why do we have an increase in the amount of incidents where men are raping, abusing and killing women indiscriminately. One of the challenges might be that there is not much being done in the way of a collaborative effort. In preparation and thought I have searched for organisations that are bringing the various elements together and the struggle became real. I could not find one organisation that is addressing all of the proactive measures that I put on this short list above.
Carl von Clausewitz wrote about the theory of war and presented Economy of force as one of the nine Principles of War, "It is the principle of employing all available combat power in the most effective way possible, in an attempt to allocate a minimum of essential combat power to any secondary efforts". Why am I writing about war? well, I believe that what we are facing is a war, and when you are facing a war you need to mobilise yourself in the manner which is congruent with a participant to a war. To break this down:
Available combat power in this context means all elements that can play a role in achieving a secure south Africa
Most effective way- a way that will carry the most benefit for South Africa with each element providing whatever is within their capabilities
In conclusion: we need to mobilise a group of like-minded organisations and individuals to start thinking deeply about these issues and finding united ways to address the various issues simultaneously. The prefix of the word division is di this indicates that there is more than one vision. When there is a united vision and consolidated action then real change can take place.
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