Today as South Africa marks Freedom Day, we commemorate the 32nd anniversary of our first democratic election, as a nation united.
This is a moment to think back to 27 April 1994, and what the dawn of democracy promised to the people of South Africa, and whether the promise has been honoured.
Electoral freedom promised so much more, including freedom from all forms of oppression, from violence and from government indifference to the lives of millions.
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Today millions of South Africans live without the most basic condition of freedom: safety.
Freedom is not only the right to vote. It is the freedom of a child to walk to school safely. It is the freedom of a mother to wait at a taxi rank without fear. It is the freedom of a shopkeeper to open for business without paying extortionists. It is the freedom of a family to sleep through the night without the terror of violent intrusion.
For far too many South Africans, that freedom has been stolen by criminals, and too often it has been surrendered by a state that has become weak, compromised and slow.
Last week the most senior Police official in the country had to be suspended for his alleged role in a criminal enterpriese. When corruption and criminality reach into the police service itself, ordinary South Africans are betrayed twice, first by the criminals on the street, and then by those inside the system who are supposed to stop them.
The DA has a bold alternative to fix the Police in South Africa, to give people the freedom of safety.
The DA's plan will clean out the top of SAPS and the Ministry through immediate integrity auditing and a Police Competency and Integrity Board with real powers to intervene, made up of real policing professionals, investigators, prosecutors, forensic specialists and governance experts.
The DA's plan includes urgently rebuilding the Hawks so that it is properly staffed, properly resourced, fully vetted and protected from political interference and the most important SAPS units, like the Special Task Force, National Intervention Unit, Tactical Response Teams, Flying Squad, Anti-Gang Units and Public Order Police will be properly equipped and resourced, and act under data-driven deployment plans, not on political whims. Their work must be intelligence led and measured against successful prosecutions.
The DA's plan will take down organised crime bosses, rather than cozy up to them. We will take down their finances, their logistics, their enablers and their political protection networks by an integrated entity including the SIU, SARS, the FIC and the NPA.
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The DA's plan will see competent provincial and local governments empowered to do more local policing, including intelligence-gathering at local level.
The DA's plan will rebuild the criminal justice chain so that arrest leads to prosecution and to conviction, and to imprisonment, using modern forensic labs, better crime scene management, stronger chain-of-custody systems, digital forensic capability and a constant pipeline of trained forensic professionals.
Freedom Day should not be a ritual of empty words while millions live behind burglar bars, fear extortion, hear gunfire at night, or bury loved ones while the state shrugs.
Freedom Day in future must mean that the state is stronger than the syndicates.
Until South Africans are free to live without fear, the promise of freedom is not complete.
