Some provincial reserves with high conservation value poorly run – report:
A shortage of critical skills, poor management and inadequate budgets impede the effective management of provincial nature reserves
Freedom Day in Philippi: Gunshots, robberies and piles of rubbish:
Freedom Day dawns in Philippi as does every other day — with gunshots, murders, robberies, car-jackings and the intimidation of City of Cape Town contract workers.
Crime has free rein here in one of Cape Town’s poorest suburbs: dustbin collectors have withdrawn services in Philippi East after a worker was shot dead on Tuesday while collecting bins. The library in Brown’s Farm has been closed after staff were robbed of their cell phones.
In nearby Samora Machel, rubbish has not been collected for weeks because employees of the cleaning company, Wastemart, contracted to the City of Cape Town, are afraid to enter the township.
Two weeks ago Wastemart employees were intimidated and threatened, apparently by a syndicate extorting protection money from government contractors.
GroundUp sent questions to Wastemart and called the number on the website but is yet to receive a response.
After the Wastemart workers were threatened, a meeting was held between the ward councillor, local leaders and the police and arrangements were made for the contractors’ vehicles to be escorted by law enforcement officers on refuse collection day, according to the City of Cape Town’s Mayco member for urban waste management, Grant Twigg.
“However, due to limited policing resources it will not be possible to sustain this in perpetuity,” said Twigg.
Then this week thugs struck again at employees of a cleaning company. One worker was shot dead in Philippi East and the killers fled the scene, according to witnesses.
Police spokesperson FC van Wyk said the murdered man was 48 years old.
“According to reports, the victim and his colleagues entered the area to empty dustbins, while they worked at the front of the truck and he at the back, they heard two shots being fired, upon inspection they found the deceased lying on the ground with a gunshot wound to his head.”
No one has been arrested and an investigation is in progress, Van Wyk said.
After the shooting, rubbish bin collection and other city services in Philippi East, Brown’s Farm and Samora Machel were immediately halted and workers congregated for safety at the Philippi East police station.
Employees of other companies have also stopped collecting waste because they have been told to stop work until their bosses pay extortion money.
Even the City of Cape Town’s stormwater drain staff have halted their service.
Rubbish is blocking the drains and Oliver Tambo Drive in Samora Machel is full of garbage. Plastic items, cardboard, rotten food, nappies, shoes, and bits of old electric appliances litter the streets.
“We are forced to burn rubbish,” said resident Nkosiyamntu Gcotyiwe. With regard to the extortion fee, Gcotyiwe said most, if not all businesses in and near Samora Machel were paying the extortion fee. If they did not, he said, they were intimidated.
“Many people have resorted to moving to other areas because they no longer felt safe around here. We don’t blame the workers because they are scared for their lives, but the city needs to up its game and deliver services. We can’t continue living in this filth, we have had enough,” said Gcotyiwe.
Ward councillor Lungisa Somdaka confirmed that city workers and contractors had stopped operating because of the threats from the criminals. Questions sent to the City of Cape Town had not been answered by the time of publication.
Philippi, with a population of more than 190 000 people in 2011, is one of Cape Town’s poorest areas, with a 38% unemployment rate according to that year’s census.
Fewer than half the households lived in formal housing and 78% earned R3 200 or less a month. A third did not have direct access to piped water and 23% did not have access to a flush toilet.
The Western Cape government’s most recent crime report notes that 183 murders were recorded at Philippi East police station, among the highest in the province.
Crime has also struck the Brown’s Farm library, which has been closed for nearly a month after criminals with guns and knives robbed four staff members of their cellphones on 29 March.
About 20 people were in the library at the time, but they were not robbed, according to City of Cape Town Mayco member for community services and health Patricia van der Ross.
Jobseekers, learners and students now have no computer access to complete their applications or assignments. The nearest library is in Crossroads, two kilometres away.
The gunmen posed as library users to gain entry into the library. This is not the first time the library has been closed by criminals: it was robbed last year in August.
Some of the people committing robberies in the area are teenagers as young as 13. They are often known to the residents, but people are scared to work with the police because they might be killed. They are even scared to speak out publicly about crime.
Weekends, from Friday to Monday morning, are especially scary, because alcohol is a major contributor to crime. Shebeens stay open until early hours of the morning and often sell to children.
“There is unemployment, a high number of school dropouts, drugs and gangsterism and few recreational facilities, let alone role models, for children. This is not a place to raise your children,” said a resident. “Another problem is inadequate street lighting and informal settlements that the police cannot access because there are no roads.”
Residents have started neighbourhood watches and members stand at crime hotspots, but armed only with sticks there is little they can do against criminals with guns.
As a result some people take the law into their own hands by assaulting or even killing people suspected of wrongdoing. — GroundUp
Putin will be arrested if he sets foot in the Western Cape – DA:
The Democratic Alliance’s Western Cape premier, Alan Winde, has warned that should Russia’s President Vladimir Putin set foot in the Western Cape, he will be arrested by local law enforcement.
“We, as the provincial government, will have him arrested by our own Western Cape Government funded Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) officers. If the South African Police Service is not instructed to act, we will,” Winde said in a statement on Thursday.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant of arrest for Putin in March for his alleged involvement in the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.
Winde’s announcement follows two days after the governing ANC “erroneously” announced it would no longer be a member of the ICC. President Cyril Ramaphosa said the same while speaking alongside his Finnish counterpart on Tuesday.
During a joint media appearance with Finland’s President Sauli Väinämö Niinistö in Pretoria, Ramaphosa said the ANC had decided it was “prudent” for South Africa to withdraw from the ICC.
“The governing party has decided once again that there should be a pull-out,” said Ramaphosa. The president’s remarks followed after the ANC’s four-day national executive committee (NEC) conference.
ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula said at a separate press conference after the NEC meeting that a resolution had been taken to withdraw from the ICC and that the ANC “just have to implement that”.
“The conference said this ICC does not serve the interest of all, it serves a few,” said Mbalula.
He said that the United States was not a signatory of the ICC, nor were “all the big powers … who are messing up the world. They cannot be arrested but they influence others to be arrested.”
Both the presidency and NEC have since tried to explain the blunder.
In a statement titled “Clarification of ANC position on the ICC” the secretary general’s office said the resolution to withdraw from the ICC was “raised as a measure of last resort”.
A withdrawal from the ICC “would arise if — and only if — the other options outlined do not yield the desired results of fairness and consistency in the administration of international law”.
“In outlining this broad context of discussion, an unintended impression may have been created that a categorical decision for an immediate withdrawal had been taken. This is not so,” maintained Mbalula’s office.
Vincent Magwenya, spokesperson for the president, confirmed that South Africa remains a signatory to the ICC, “in line with a resolution to fit [the] national conference of the ANC down in December 2022 to rescind an earlier decision to withdraw from the ICC”.
In March, parliament announced the withdrawal of the International Crimes Bill tabled in 2016 to repeal South Africa’s membership of the ICC.
The bill had been formulated on reflection of the country’s reluctance to arrest ICC fugitive Omar al-Bashir in 2015, who was the then president of Sudan. No reasons were given for the proposed bill being scrapped.
Amnesty International South Africa welcomed the ANC’s clarification.
“We welcome the clarification since, that ‘South Africa will remain a signatory to the Rome Statute’ and the continued recognition of ‘the importance of strengthening institutions of global governance’,” said Shenilla Mohamed, the South African executive director of Amnesty International in South Africa.
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