The Democratic Alliance (DA) has written yet again to the Mpumalanga Provincial Police Commissioner, Lieutenant General Semakaleng Daphney Manamela, urging the establishment of a Rural Safety Unit after another farm murder was reported in the province.
It has been reported that Joseph Jan Shabangu, a 49-year-old Mpumalanga farmer, appeared in the Bethal Magistrate Court this week facing a murder charge. This occurred after he was arrested on Sunday for allegedly shooting and killing a 35-year-old man who was suspected of poaching illegally on his farm in Bethal.
Rural communities in this province, including farmers as well as farm workers, are at a high risk of being attacked in isolated farms and the South African Police Service (SAPS) has failed dismally to protect them as it does not have dedicated Rural Safety Units that can be deployed in farming communities.
In recent years, the DA has been asking the National and Provincial governments to establish dedicated Rural Safety Units after we noticed that isolated plots and farming areas have become easy targets for criminals who want to commit house robberies which eventually lead to farm murders and farm attacks. The DA went as far as submitting its own proposed Rural Safety Plan in 2019. But nothing concrete came out of it.
The only positive thing that the government did was to hold a Rural Safety Summit in June 2022. This Summit was intended to produce strategies that would ensure greater safety for food producing farming communities. But to date, little to no progress has been made available towards the implementation of the strategy or utilizing the summit findings to improve its effectiveness.
The safety situation in South Africa’s rural areas is intolerable and cannot be allowed to continue unencumbered. A lot of promises have been made in the wake of the recent farm murders; it is now time that they are implemented, and that farmers and farm workers are protected and not left at the mercy of criminals.
For the sake of food security, the DA would also like to call on the private sector, NGOs and farm watches to pledge their support to farming communities by banding together and demand the immediate and effective implementation of a Rural Safety Plan.
The DA will continue the fight to ensure that all South Africans are afforded equal protection and safety by government and SAPS as determined in our Constitution.