GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
16 April 2026
*Note to Editor: This speech was delivered during the Sitting of the House today in the Western Cape Provincial Parliament
Speaker,
The Western Cape Government blames the culture of gangsterism in the province on the police to avoid accountability for the consequences of its own ideological and political failures.
The DA has been in government in Cape Town for 20 years, and in the Western Cape for 18 years. The people of the Cape Flats are now paying, in blood, for their governments’ failures to develop and implement strategies to transform the radically divided and unequal apartheid city, while at the same time managing the global phenomenon of urbanisation…
Far easier to complain than to accept responsibility, which would require actually doing something.
It is an indictment on all of us who work as public representatives that if the mythical Rip van Winkle were to have fallen asleep in Hanover Park, Manenberg, or Nyanga in 1993, and woken up only yesterday, he’d see no signs of South Africa’s change to democracy. For that, he’d have to go to the Waterfront or Claremont.
Speaker…
It’s obviously true that Cape Town and the Western Cape would benefit from better policing, but it is a lie that there’s nothing that the City or Province could do to fix things – including allegedly skewed police deployments.
The Western Cape Constitution and the Western Cape Community Safety Act provide for this government to move beyond complaining and take action.
Responding to my written questions a few months ago, Minister Marais indicated that the Provincial Government’s unhappiness about police resources related to allegedly skewed deployment within the province.
She said the Provincial Government had “repeatedly recommended to the SAPS” that its system of allocations needed to take cognisance of which areas were experiencing most crime.
She confirmed that the Police Service Act provides for Provincial Commissioners to distribute policing resources.
Has the Minister or Premier actually sat down with the Provincial Commissioner to discuss allocations? If the Commissioner ignores them, the provincial Constitution lays out a process to have him removed… Where are we with this process?
In 2019, the Premier, then the MEC for Safety, initiated an intergovernmental dispute about police resourcing. Shortly after he was elected Premier, he made more noise.
Seven years have now passed: What has this government done to force the Provincial Police Commissioner to implement its Policing Needs and Priorities assessment? Nothing, beyond repeating its intention to declare an inter-governmental dispute in this year’s SOPA.
Easier to blame and announce disputes than take real action.
Media Enquiries: media@forgood.org.za