Shoot-to-kill call senseless

THE reaction to the high level of crime, and individual incidents of it, in South Africa has often been characterised by emotional expressions of frustration, helplessness and vengeful anger, rather than practical, workable action. So it is with the deputy safety and security minister‘s nigh hysterical outburst earlier this week. Susan Shabangu told an anti-crime forum in Pretoria that the police should “kill the bastards (criminals)” and “not worry about regulations”.

Predictably, just like Jacob Zuma‘s call a month ago for a referendum on whether the country should reinstate capital punishment, Shabangu‘s statement has drawn widespread – and equally emotional support – from a public weary of theft, murder, robbery and rape.

And just like Zuma, Shabangu has been criticised by the SA Human Rights Commission for playing to the gallery by spouting empty rhetoric that cannot be translated into action without incurring new legal complications for the police.

Are criminals quaking in their stolen boots upon hearing Shabangu‘s empty threats? We doubt it. More likely they are sitting cleaning their gun barrels and chuckling at her naive attempts to distract attention from her government‘s failure to tackle crime in a meaningful way.

She and her ministerial colleagues are bogged down in a senseless fight over the disbanding of the Scorpions, who have been playing a leading role in curbing the activities of the syndicates who operate at the top of the criminal food chain.

It would be better to give the police modern laboratories where they can run sophisticated forensic tests as well as better investigative and combat training and new, good quality equipment rather than orders they cannot follow.

The reality is that the constitutionally-tested statutory law does not allow the police to shoot to kill in any circumstance other than where life is threatened.

As in the case with capital punishment, the courts will not take another view on the matter unless the constitution itself is changed.

And if we begin tampering with it, then we are on the proverbial slope where we meddle with the nation‘s founding document to meet short-term, political goals.

Heaven help cricket!

THE advent of the lucrative new Indian Premier League Twenty20 cricket league is the latest threat to the game cricket traditionalists love and admire – five-day Test matches, for many, the only true form of the game.

Fitting the slam bam, thank you ma‘am tournament into an already busy international schedule will inevitably lead to sacrifices, and already it seems certain it will be Test matches that will have to make way. And that is a great shame, if not a tragedy, for the sport.

The money on offer for the Indian Twenty20 series has already ensured all the world‘s best players have flocked to join in the fun, some even waving goodbye to their Test careers for fear of losing out. Who in their right mind would turn down the offer to earn hundreds of thousands of US dollars for little more than a month‘s cricket?

So it is unlikely the series – touted as the biggest thing to hit world cricket since the Kerry Packer rebel circus of the 1970s – will be anything but a massive success. Yet we do not believe it is good for the sport once appropriately referred to as the gentleman‘s game. It is a further ruthless dumbing-down of a sport where skill and finesse once went hand in hand.

But, as always, money talks and the hit and giggle game that is Twenty20 cricket has caught the imagination of the paying public. The Indian league promises to be no different – heaven help cricket!

Opinion