South Africa’s violent-crime crisis is not only a policing failure, argues Dr Nisaar Ahmed Korowlay. It is a test of government’s constitutional duty to protect citizens, confront corruption and deliver safety beyond election day.
Image: Ayanda Ndamane / ANAStudio
South Africans have lived with violent crime for so long that we are in danger of accepting the unacceptable as normal.
We speak routinely about murders, hijackings, robberies, kidnappings, extortion and gang violence. We avoid certain roads after dark, warn our children where not to walk, and surround our homes with walls, electric fencing, cameras, alarms and private security.
We have redesigned our lives around crime.But perhaps we are asking the wrong question.
Instead of constantly asking citizens what they should do to avoid becoming victims, we should be asking: What is the State doing to prevent them from becoming victims in the first place?
Protecting citizens is not an optional function of government. It is one of the fundamental reasons government exists.
Our Constitution guarantees the right to life and the right to freedom and security of the person, including freedom from violence from either public or private sources.
Yet far too many South Africans continue to live in fear.
Statistics should never obscure the human tragedy.
Parliament’s Parliamentary Budget Office reported that murders increased by 9.6% from the second to the third quarter of 2025/26, from an average of approximately 63 murders per day to 69 murders per day.
Sixty-nine people murdered, on average, every day.
They are not merely statistics. They are fathers, mothers, sons and daughters who left home expecting to return.
The same parliamentary analysis showed that the Eastern Cape and Western Cape had the country’s highest provincial murder rates per capita during that quarter. Four of the five leading police-station murder hotspots nationally were in the Western Cape: Mfuleni, Nyanga, Delft and Gugulethu.
And statistics repeatedly acquire names, faces and grieving families.
Over the night of 8–9 August 2026, 11 people were killed in three separate mass shootings in Khayelitsha, Langa and Gugulethu.
These killings occurred against the backdrop of the deployment of the South African National Defence Force in the Western Cape under Operation Prosper, supporting SAPS efforts against gangsterism and violent crime.
That should trouble every South African.
Deploying soldiers onto our streets is no ordinary intervention. It demonstrates the seriousness of the threat confronting some communities.
But soldiers cannot substitute for effective policing, reliable crime intelligence, competent detective work, functioning forensic services, successful prosecutions and the dismantling of criminal networks.
You cannot solve systemic institutional failure simply by putting more uniforms on the streets.If criminals retreat when security forces arrive, only to return when operations move elsewhere, the State has not defeated crime.It has merely interrupted it.
Government interventions must therefore be judged not only by how many police officers or soldiers are deployed, how many operations are announced or how many strategies are launched.
The ultimate measure is much simpler: Are fewer South Africans being murdered?
Government correctly recognises that crime against tourists threatens jobs, investment, tourism and South Africa’s international reputation.
It has therefore developed targeted interventions through the National Tourism Safety Strategy, National Tourism Safety Forum, Tourism Monitors and partnerships involving government, law enforcement and the private sector.
That is commendable.
Every person who visits our country deserves protection.
But the existence of such coordinated interventions raises an uncomfortable question: If government can identify hotspots, coordinate agencies and mobilise resources when tourism is threatened, should ordinary South Africans expect anything less?
The mother travelling home from work deserves that urgency.
The pensioner collecting a grant deserves it.
The shopkeeper facing extortion deserves it.
The child walking home from school deserves it.
Our international reputation matters. But surely the lives of our own people matter at least as much.
Any serious discussion about government’s ability to protect citizens is incomplete without confronting corruption and maladministration.
Every rand stolen, diverted or squandered is money that cannot be used for police vehicles, detectives, forensic laboratories, technology, intelligence systems or other resources needed to protect citizens.
The corrupt do not merely steal money. They steal capacity from the State and opportunity from the people.South Africans cannot continually be told that resources are insufficient while simultaneously watching public money being wasted, mismanaged or stolen.
Many citizens effectively pay twice: first through taxation for a State that should protect them, and then again for private security because they fear it cannot.
But millions of poorer South Africans cannot purchase that second layer of protection.They simply remain exposed.Safety itself is becoming another expression of inequality.
The wealthy can buy protection.
The poor cannot.
Then comes the uncomfortable political question.
Every election cycle, citizens suddenly become extraordinarily important.Politicians arrive in communities. Hands are shaken. Promises are made. Rallies are held. The language becomes one of our people and your future.
Then the election passes.
The posters disappear.
The motorcades move on.
But the criminals remain.
South Africans are therefore entitled to ask: Have citizens become little more than voting cattle — politically precious when their votes are required, but frighteningly expendable afterwards?
This is not a question for one political party alone.
It should confront every political party and every sphere of government entrusted with public power.
Democracy cannot mean that citizens matter only when another mandate is required.
Citizenship must mean something between elections.
South Africa’s crisis of violence extends far beyond street crime and gangsterism.
It enters our homes, schools, workplaces and intimate relationships.
Women and children continue to experience unacceptable levels of violence. Domestic abuse, vigilantism and violence within communities point to something deeper than a policing problem alone.
We are confronting not only a crime crisis, but a society in which violence risks becoming disturbingly normalised.
When violence becomes an accepted way of resolving conflict, asserting power or expressing anger, policing alone cannot solve the problem.
Government must enforce the law and protect its citizens. But society must also confront the conditions, attitudes and behaviours that allow violence to reproduce itself across communities and generations.
This does not diminish the responsibility of the State.
It makes that responsibility even greater.
Protecting citizens requires more than responding after someone has been killed, assaulted or traumatised. It requires preventing the conditions in which violence is allowed to flourish.
Government does not commit every murder, robbery or hijacking.
Criminals must remain responsible for the crimes they commit.
Nor would it be fair to pretend that government has done nothing. Police operations, specialised units, community initiatives and additional security resources demonstrate attempts to confront the crisis.
But acknowledging those interventions does not absolve the State of accountability for their effectiveness.
Government remains responsible for maintaining institutions capable of preventing crime, investigating it and bringing offenders to justice.
When policing, intelligence, investigations and prosecutions repeatedly fail, the State cannot simply detach itself from the consequences.
Government may not pull the trigger.
It may not hijack the vehicle.
It may not invade the home.
But persistent institutional failure can create an environment in which criminals become increasingly emboldened.
And when corruption contributes to weakening the institutions meant to protect citizens, political accountability becomes even more compelling.
Perhaps the most disturbing evidence of our crime crisis is visible not in statistics, but in how we live.
Look at our walls, gates, cameras and electric fences.
Look at how we check our surroundings before entering our driveways.
Look at parents worrying when children are late.
Look at businesses forced to spend enormous sums protecting their premises.
The law-abiding South African has been forced to modify his or her behaviour more than the criminal has modified theirs.
The citizen retreats behind higher walls while the criminal occupies public space.
That cannot become our definition of normality.
Ultimately, everything comes back to one question: What is the most basic responsibility of a government towards the people who placed it in power?
Before slogans, grand projects and election promises, surely there is something more fundamental: Protect your people.
Citizens stand in queues and place their crosses on ballot papers. They entrust politicians with enormous power. They pay taxes to sustain the institutions of the State.
In return, they are entitled to expect government to use every reasonable resource available to protect their lives, dignity and freedom.
When government repeatedly fails in this responsibility, it is not failing at some peripheral administrative function.
It is failing at one of the very reasons government exists.
Citizens should not become prisoners inside their own homes while criminals move freely outside them.
They should not have to buy privately the protection for which they already contribute through taxation.
And they should not be remembered primarily when their votes are required.
The people who give a government its power should never have to beg that same government to protect their lives.
Government can point to strategies, committees, budgets, operations and statistics.
But the ordinary citizen has a much simpler test: Do I feel safe in my own country?
If millions cannot confidently answer yes, then whatever else government may have achieved, there remains a profound failure in one of the most fundamental obligations of the State.
This is not an attack on South Africa.
Patriotism is not pretending everything is fine.
Patriotism is caring enough about your country to demand better from it.
Protect every tourist who visits our country.
But: Protect the South African citizen with at least the same determination.
The true measure of government is not merely what appears in policy documents or ministerial speeches.
It is whether a mother believes her child will come home tonight.
Whether a pensioner can walk to the shop without fear.
Whether a business can operate without paying protection money.
Whether a child can walk to school safely.
Whether a family can sleep without barricading itself inside its own home.
That is not an unreasonable demand.
It is the most basic expectation of citizenship.
South Africans are not statistics.
We are not electoral numbers.
We are not voting cattle.
We are citizens.
Our taxes are not there to enrich the corrupt.
Our votes are not blank cheques for political power.
And our constitutional rights are not promises to be honoured only when convenient.
Our lives, our dignity and our safety must matter to those who govern us every single day — not merely on election day.
Dr Nisaar Ahmed Korowlay is a Nuclear Medicine Consultant at Tygerberg Hospital, Cape Town, with over two decades of experience. He is Chairperson of the Janjira Habsani Educational and Social Society (JHESS), where he champions education, community service, and ethical leadership. Dr Korowlay combines professional excellence with a deep commitment to faith, compassion, and community empowerment. His guiding philosophy is simple: true leadership is measured by service to others.
Image: Supplied
** Dr Nisaar Ahmed Korowlay is a Nuclear Medicine Consultant at Tygerberg Hospital, Cape Town, with over two decades of experience. He is Chairperson of the Janjira Habsani Educational and Social Society (JHESS), where he champions education, community service, and ethical leadership. Dr Korowlay combines professional excellence with a deep commitment to faith, compassion, and community empowerment. His guiding philosophy is simple: true leadership is measured by service to others.*
*** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL.*
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