JOHANNESBURG—The summer sun was setting over the sea of shacks in Diepsloot, a township north of South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, on Dec 1. The mob took turns hurling chunks of broken brick against the bodies and heads of five young men who were kneeling in the gravel, hands bound behind their backs.
An old woman wielding a wrought-iron bar stepped up to strike one of the men, who were accused of gang-raping a teenager, across the top of his head.
“Don’t kill them; don’t kill them! They must burn!” another woman screamed, her white T-shirt proclaiming “LOVE” in glittery pink cursive; her wild, wide eyes proclaiming raging hatred.
Streams of blood and urine pooled in the dirt alongside the men, their bodies wracked with shivers of fear in 96-degree Fahrenheit heat.
Three men stepped from the confines of the crowd, each carrying a tire filled with gasoline. They didn’t bother hiding their faces, even as two carloads of police officers stood nearby, 9 mm pistols remaining holstered.
The designated executioners placed the tires around the naked men’s bodies. One lit a match. The mob cheered; children as young as 4 danced in the dust and laughed as the alleged perpetrators, turned victims, shrieked in agony and burned to death.
“There’s nothing we can do to stop stuff like this,” one of the policemen later told The Epoch Times. “If we draw our guns and shoot, we’ll cause a bigger massacre, and the mob will burn us too.”
His colleague, watching the flesh char and smolder, said: “All I am hoping for is to leave the police; get a different career. We don’t stop any crime here; we just call ambulances. We just collect bodies. That’s our work. We don’t get paid to police; we get paid to pick up pieces.”
The second cop nodded.
“Like rubbish collectors,” he said. “Except that everyone hates us.”
Ntombi Shangase, 62, who watched the mob kill the alleged criminals, told The Epoch Times: “We don’t trust the police to protect us. We have gangs here that steal whatever they want, kill whoever they want, and rape our babies and girls.
“We call the police to help and they don’t come. They’re too scared to come. So we must do things for ourselves.”
The return of the “necklace” method of mob justice in South Africa offers “the most brutal proof of the collapse of policing” in Africa’s most industrialized economy, Dr. Witness Maluleke, criminal justice expert at the University of Limpopo, told The Epoch Times.
The necklace, which rose to international notoriety during the 1980s was used by “self-defense units” affiliated with the then-banned African National Congress (ANC) to execute people accused of being “impimpis” (informants) for the apartheid security police.
South Africa, riven by inequality exacerbated by the world’s highest unemployment rate, poverty, violent crime, and ANC government mismanagement and corruption, now has the second-highest homicide rate in the world.
Global economists say out-of-control violent crime is one of the key indicators of a failed state.
That’s more than 75 people killed every day.
The rise in homicides since 2011 has been “remarkable,” according to David Bruce, a criminologist at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria.
“The increase has been 77 percent. The number of murders has increased from 15,500 to 27,500 per year,“ Mr. Bruce told The Epoch Times. ”When people are talking about the per-capita rate, it’s a very substantial increase of 52 percent.
“It was at 29.5 per 100,000 in 2011, and it’s now 45. If you’re looking at the Eastern Cape, our province with the highest murder rate, the rate is 71 per 100,000 and that’s a truly frightening number.”
South Africa is on course to record more than 30,000 homicides in 2023, a figure last seen in 1980s apartheid South Africa.
When the ANC came to power after the country’s first multiparty, multiracial elections in 1994, it vowed to create an “inclusive” police “service” to protect all citizens, regardless of race.
It dismantled the South African Police Force, firing many apartheid-era detectives and senior officers and replacing them with former members of liberation-era, Soviet-trained armed groups, such as the ANC’s uMkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) and the Azanian Peoples’ Liberation Army.
Mr. Maluleke said the government, has over the years, through its action and inaction, “created a culture of impunity, a culture according to which it’s possible and, in fact, probable that you’ll literally get away with murder.
“The people hear of politicians hiring hit squads to murder rivals,“ he said. ”They see the poorly trained police botching investigations by contaminating crime scenes. They see the government stealing billions of dollars in corrupt schemes, and hardly anyone is ever charged for these crimes.
“The politicians are corrupt; the police themselves are corrupt, asking for bribes to do the simplest of tasks.
“So all around there’s lack of trust and lack of faith in the very structures that are supposed to keep people safe. This is the atmosphere we now have in South Africa, a toxic atmosphere that’s breeding crime of all kinds.”
“We’re talking here about police officers who are drunk on duty. We’re talking about officers who rape girls in police cells. We’re talking about officers who allegedly hire themselves out as assassins and commit murder and use their firearms to rob vehicles taking cash to banks,“ Mr. Terblanche told The Epoch Times. ”These are the kinds of people we now employ as police officers.”
For Mr. Bruce and many other South African crime experts, the steadily rising numbers of homicides can be ascribed to a confluence of factors: declining quality of police training; the disbandment of specialized investigative squads; the proliferation of illegal firearms; violent organized crime; lack of proactive policing; corruption within the upper echelons of the police service and government and unemployment and poverty.
Mr. Bruce said the recent steep climb in murders is also being driven by spikes in mass shootings related to political and business rivalries and contract killings linked to organized crime.
“The shocking levels of violent crime, including armed robbery, rape, and murder, are a direct result of weak leadership together with poor policy and management decisions,” Andrew Whitfield, South African shadow minister of policing and DA party member, told The Epoch Times.
“On the ANC’s watch, in less than a decade, the police service has lost 8,000 detectives and 5,000 reservists and the DNA backlog remains unacceptably high at over 50,000 case exhibits.
“These failures have compromised our criminal justice system playing straight into the hands of the criminals. It’s easy to get away with murder in South Africa.”
Since he was appointed minister of police in early 2018, Mr. Cele, a former ANC guerrilla, has based his strategy to combat criminals and decrease crime on two tenets: “Shoot to Kill” and “Put More Boots on the Ground.”
After delivering the latest crime statistics to the nation recently, he vowed to employ “thousands more officers” to “fight the killers.”
However, the government’s strategy of “throwing” more police at violent crime isn’t working, according to Guy Lamb, a criminologist at the University of Cape Town.
“Since 2011, the government’s been declaring ‘war on crime,’ a very strange thing to do because crime is a social phenomenon,” Mr. Lamb told The Epoch Times.
“You make crime less by taking positive action against the real drivers of crime, like unemployment.
“You make crime less by being an example yourself and by jailing corrupt politicians instead of rewarding them with senior positions.
“You make crime less by jailing the police and army members who hire their weapons out to gangs who then go and commit violent cash-in-transit heists.
“You can’t decrease crime by throwing numbers of poorly trained police officers onto the streets and telling them to ‘shoot to kill.’ That’s the worst thing you can do.”
Mr. Whitfield said more than 130,000 South Africans have been killed since Mr. Cele was appointed, yet South African President Cyril Ramaphosa refuses to fire him.
As an ANC veteran, Mr. Cele enjoys significant support in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal, the country’s most populous province.
Mr. Whitfield recalled a pledge made by South Africa’s first democratic leader, Nelson Mandela, shortly after he became president almost 30 years ago: “Mandela said never again in history would the police be used as a political instrument to favor the ruling party.
“Yet here we sit, with a police service packed with ANC appointees whose job is to protect ANC officials from prosecution, instead of protecting citizens from vicious killers.”
