One cannot help crying that the Eastern Cape is now home to the murder capital of the country.
Mthatha used to hold the ignominious title of being the provincial murder capital but this has been eclipsed by New Brighton in Nelson Mandela Bay which has been elevated to being the murder capital of the country with 18 murders per 100,000 people.
Gqeberha, Buffalo City Metro, Mthatha, and Lusikisiki are the four crime hotspots for robbery, burglary, and rape in the province.
The rural areas of the province that once used to be the epitome of pastoral peace have become killing fields and the communities who live there now face even greater travails than the endemic grinding poverty that dislocates their social fabric by forcing breadwinners and parents to leave their families while they seek employment in cities and other provinces.
Crime, violence, mass murders, drug and alcohol abuse, rape, and human trafficking have become additional curses in these communities.
It’s no wonder then that premier Oscar Mabuyane admitted in December 2022 that the ANC had let the people of rural areas down.
He said: “But many of our villages — who by the way are the voting constituency of the ANC — still do not have access to water, electricity and their roads are not drivable to mention a few. On top of that our people have to contend with unemployment and high crime rates.
“If we look across the Kei River, in 28 years of our democracy there have not been any major economic development initiatives that really changed the profile of Amathole, OR Tambo, Chris Hani, Joe Gqabi, and Alfred Nzo districts, hence residents from these districts migrate to urban centres in large numbers. This situation cannot all be blamed on apartheid.”
It is also the failure of leadership of the ANC that we still sit with high unemployment, poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment in rural areas.
Mabuyane’s admission is the worst possible indictment of this government, yet the people of the Eastern Cape still entrust the ANC with the highest percentage of political support than in any other province.
In this regard, we would do well to heed the words of Lumumba who said, “The tragedy with Africa is that the people with ideas are not in government and those in government have no ideas, and when the people have a chance, they still vote for those without ideas”.
This kind of slavish loyalty toward the liberation movements of Africa is akin to the cutting off of one’s nose to spite one’s face and in the Eastern Cape it is no different.
It is precisely this paucity of ideas, poor policy choices, and lack of leadership that has turned the rural hinterland of our province into a quagmire of hopelessness and created the perfect environment for anti-social behaviour that has engulfed these communities.
Most of the worst affected areas are under the custodianship of traditional leaders who once presided over more harmonious communities.
This has sadly all been eroded by the undermining of this authority by an incompetent, corrupt, and unaccountable government.
The withdrawal of their unearned and undeserving electoral mandate is the only way to redress the current status quo.
The worsening grip of poverty is also due to the spectacular failure of rural development and agrarian reform, despite the existence of a whole department dedicated to this endeavour.
Almost every agricultural project and co-operative enterprise in rural areas has failed and the net losers are the rural communities and their supporting towns and villages who are treated as voting fodder by the ANC.
These platteland towns have become little more than Sassa pay points and centres of consumption with negligible or no economic production or industrial output.
The absence of breadwinners and adult supervision in families due to the record-high rate of urbanisation and migration of desperate income seekers has left the youth of these areas exposed to a dearth of adult example and leadership which compounds their vulnerability to the lure of drug and alcohol abuse which are the root of anti-social and criminal behaviour.
One only has to consider the tragic incident in Buffalo City Metro where 21 young children died in the Enyobeni tavern disaster in 2022 when they were allowed out late and unsupervised by their parents and given access to the age-restricted enterprise by the proprietors, despite being obviously under aged.
Substance abuse is a growing societal challenge, especially among the youth.
This scourge can only be overcome through the collective collaboration between parents, schools, churches, and all the relevant state institutions which is not happening.
The policing in rural areas is woeful with police officers poorly supervised, totally demoralised, under-resourced, and frankly overwhelmed.
The fact that many police stations are protected by private security companies or simply locked up at night out of fear of criminals is also a crying shame.
Rampant stock theft in these areas cannot be controlled by the SAPS stocktheft units as they are ill-equipped, under-resourced, and often implicated in syndicates, so the farming communities that can afford it employ private security companies, adding additional expense to safeguard their livelihoods.
Recent incidences of drug finds on the beaches and ports in this province imply that our coastline has become a drug distribution conduit with children as young as 10 arrested in possession of large amounts of drugs.
Albert Einstein posited that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result”.
It, therefore, goes without saying that if we want to address this parlous situation, we need to do something radically different and the first step is for the people of this province to register to vote, then actually change their voting pattern.
We are no longer going to continue doing the same thing expecting a different outcome nor will we continue crying for our province without doing everything possible to redress the lived reality of the people of this province.
Athol Trollip, ActionSA Eastern Cape provincial chair
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