Daily Maverick
Dailymaverick logo

Opinionistas

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are not that of Daily Maverick.....

Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu — precious little 'festive season' cheer from your offline government

Bhekisisa Mncube
By Bhekisisa Mncube
19 Dec 2024
Facebook
3
My leader, I wanted to talk to you about the South African Police Service and its “concomitant” failures, not due to incompetence (of course, some officers are incompetent; that’s life). Still, the glaring failure I am talking about is the design-induced failure. Of course, for five years or more, we had a jester for a police minister who enjoyed watching himself on TV but did nothing to upgrade the police service’s archaic systems from victim statement taking, case number generation, detective allocation and actual court ready dockets aided and abetted by technology. Everything is paper-based, and we are in 2024, nogal.

Ah, Chief Dwasaho! I am writing to you a few days before Christmas not to wish you a Merry Christmas. This isn’t the time for festivities and trivia. We all know the number of people who have already died on our roads, and they do so every “festive season”. 

Your government has precisely the same strategy: count the bodies and send them to the mortuary. Fair enough, our drivers are maniacs (government training centres routinely give licences without testing new drivers). Everyone is “late” and must speed up to get there first. It is the mindset of a society with a broken fabric. Nobody learns, no matter the number of bodies they see on the highways and byways. We even have a unique tragedy of black children dying in the townships due to speeding drivers. 

Of course, township children have nowhere else to play but the roads. For 30 years, the apartheid spatial design hasn’t been tampered with. The status quo suits the guys with the Blue Lights and amoeba markets. During the “New Dawn” (2018 to 2023), according to the Road Traffic Management Corporation, 9,777 people perished on the roads only during the so-called “festive season”. Here are audited corporation’s stats for 2018/19,  2020/2021,  2021/2022, 2022/2023, 2023-2024. 

Of course, the whole government system is offline. Suppose a traffic officer stops you on the side of the road. In that case, he looks at your driver’s licence, licence plate, an identifier for vehicles uniquely registered to the vehicle owner and recorded in the National Traffic Information System (eNaTIS). He also checks the annual vehicle licence disc. Once he is done, and it is always “he” in my case, he tells me the offence and penalty, and yet he gives me a form to fill in my details yet again, the same ones on the licence plate and vehicle licence disc. 

Fool’s errand


It is time consuming and a fool’s errand; what if I write the wrong details? You do all this for a R250 fine; it takes at least an hour, no matter the offence. Why can’t they scan the disc and let you sign the acceptance of the fine on a device? Even better, point-of-sale machines can be used to pay on the spot, and not as a “cold drink” type payment. This is just one form of the institutional dysfunctionality of the ANC-led government for 30 long years. It is 30 years of lack of innovation, design thinking, knowledge management, agility and, of course, an absence of common sense. Clearly, we are led by intellectual toads. I digress.

My leader, I wanted to talk to you about the South African Police Service (SAPS) and its “concomitant” failures, not due to incompetence (of course, some officers are incompetent; that’s life). Still, the glaring failure I am talking about is the design-induced failure. Of course, for five years or more, we had a jester for a police minister who enjoyed watching himself on TV but did nothing to upgrade the police service’s archaic systems from victim statement taking, case number generation, detective allocation and actual court ready dockets aided and abetted by technology. Everything is paper-based, and we are in 2024, nogal. The less said about Crime un-Intelligence and its shenanigans, the better. 

Here is a case study of the failure of the SAPS by design, not even the rampant incompetence seen daily in the public service. On Friday last week, my daughter (20) was robbed of her smartphone at the Prasa Rondebosch train station at gunpoint. She found an angel of mercy to report the crime to us. 

We explained the steps: get in touch with the bank via the website or in person, delink your banking app from your phone and do the same with a Samsung wallet; step two: go to the nearest police station to report the crime. She diligently did, and within four hours all initial steps were covered, which was quite remarkable in South Africa, where everybody is busy at the police station satisfying (sic) certifying documents and trying to find elusive jobs. As a computer fundi, she continued communicating with us via desktop WhatsApp. Step three: go to the bank, get a temporary bank card, and buy a cheap phone. Guys, can you see the magnitude of the admin of the aftermath of crimes in South Africa? Then, we waited for the case number and a detective to be allocated. Meanwhile, my daughter watched her phone move from District Six to Langa via an app. 

Professional and empathetic


As a father, I had to do something. I called my contacts in the media to find a helpful police officer in Cape Town. Within an hour, I had the name of a constable. As a writer, I wrote two pages outlining the sequence of events and our anxiety about our daughter alone in Cape Town while we were stuck in Pretoria. I was surprised that the constable I contacted via WhatsApp phoned me within two minutes. We spoke for a while, and I explained my story again via “viva voce”, Latin for living voice. She was very professional and empathetic, with more civility as a civil servant than the 1,000 more I have dealt with. There were two problems: the case wasn’t in her jurisdiction, and she needed access to a state car. She promised to seek permission from her commander (???) to assist me. The National Development Plan, allegedly our policy lodestar, is quite clear about the need to demilitarise the police service. I digress. 

We continued communicating on WhatsApp with the constable, but her commander never finished his/her meeting before it was time for her to go home. Meanwhile, she needed help finding a way to expedite the issuance of the case number or the allocation of a detective. She couldn’t. If a sympathetic police officer can’t move the needle, what hope is there for Joe Public? She even gave me her private mobile number to talk to her once I had a case number. I did, and she has been silent on me ever since. 

The case number arrived seven hours after the case was opened — a travesty of justice. To make matters worse, it wasn’t allocated to any detective. As I type this, a week later, I still don’t know the detective who had 24 hours to retrieve an illegal firearm, recover the stolen phone, and arrest the suspect. My daughter hasn’t received trauma counselling at state expense despite being the victim of an armed robbery. All opportunities were lost due to structural inertia and paper-based systems lacking the sacred state “duty of care” — a hallmark of the government since former president Thabo Mbeki was removed from Mahlamba Ndlopfu at lightning speed. He wasn’t even allowed to have breakfast that morning. The audacity! 

Clueless


A day after finally getting the elusive case number, I had to call Vodacom to block the phone, which was under contract in my name for my beloved daughter. I phoned 082 135, and to my surprise, I followed the prompts until I reached a virtual assistant (a bot) who was more clueless than a Grade 10 call centre agent. After an hour of trying — on a Saturday, my beer-guzzling day — my wife, who isn’t on Vodacom, phoned the same number, and voilà, she was connected to a real person.

If you thought the bot was useless, the real-person consultant was a dimwit who knew nothing. I am no stranger to blocking phones, as two of mine have been stolen in the past five years — both incidents involving e-hailing vehicles, but that’s a story for another day.

So, my leader, what are we paying taxes for if the state, with its exclusive constitutional mandate to investigate and prosecute crimes, fails due to sheer inertia and static systems? I acknowledge you stood at the door, preventing the barbarians from seizing the Treasury, but your efforts in addressing crime, gender-based violence and road fatalities have failed. The elephant in the room is: what else have you done since you assumed the reins and took up residence at Mahlamba Ndlopfu? What meaningful changes have you made in the lives of the “masses of our people”? 

Till next year, my man. Send me nowhere, Ke December boss. DM

Categories:

Tags: