Losing What We Have Left: Rail And Power Vandals Must Face Might Of Law

GOOD Statement by Brett Herron
GOOD Secretary General & Member Of Parliament

1 September 2022

NOTE: This speech was delivered today during a debate in the National Assembly.

A few weeks ago, I met a group of unemployed members of the Manenberg community who, instead of just sitting around, have taken it upon themselves to convert an informal dumpsite in their neighbourhood into a clean, landscaped area where children can play.

Next to the dumpsite is an overgrown area that used to be a playpark. But the swings, slides and jungle-jim have been stolen by “recyclers”, and the Cape Town council has given up on the project. There is no sign that their metal theft unit is having any impact anywhere on the Cape Flats.

The recyclers have also incidentally stripped the wiring from many streetlights in the vicinity, plunging parts of an area notorious for gangsterism into darkness at night…

Across the country, precious infrastructure, from electrical wiring and fittings, to fencing, railings and anything metallic, is being vandalized, stripped, or stolen by criminals and sold to scrap merchants.

It affects every stratum of our society, from community level to the national electricity grid…

While there has been major public focus on government under-performance and corruption over the past 10 or 12 years, too little attention is paid to those steadily eroding that which the State does or has delivered in the past.

Take Eskom, for example. While the intermittent blackouts the country has been suffering for more than a decade is largely due to maladministration and mismanagement, the company is also plagued by vandalism, the theft of its resources and, possibly, sabotage – which it appears powerless to stop.

Minister of Police Bheki Cele recently said he was surprised by the level of criminality endured by some of our power stations… stories of high-ranking staff hiring personal security for their families, and missing barrels containing thousands of liters of fuel.

With respect, the Minister shouldn’t be surprised. Signs of the vandalism and theft of our infrastructure are all around us.

According to the mining sector, which is a foundation of our economy, Billions of Rands has been lost due to the vandalism of rail system infrastructure.

Money like that should be creating jobs, strengthening the South African economy, reinvested into communities, roads, schools, and dreams…

The impunity of the vandals and thieves matches that of the white-collar criminals occupying State and private sector offices.

The absence of a functional criminal justice system is holding South Africa’s development back in a myriad of ways…

We must prioritise the protection of that which we have, because it is the foundation on which we need to build a more just society.

We must invest in internal corruption initiatives, resource the security of our rail infrastructure, and arrest the illegal recyclers who are sabotaging our progress.

Without swift intervention we will lose what little we have left.

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