Many would have wondered where police minister Bheki Cele was coming from when, during a press conference, he mentioned that the police were less equipped than the zama zamas – groups of loosely connected illegal mining bandits.
Yes, it is a deliberate mention of the kinds of crimes soldiers are envisaged to help police win the war on crime. It is difficult to imagine how troops trained in the art of war, killing machines, are going to help the police to fight the crime stalking ordinary people every step of their everyday lives.
A few weeks ago an anniversary of a mass deployment of troops into residential areas went largely unnoticed. A reader wrote to Sowetan and reminded the nation that it was 28 years since apartheid president PW Botha declared the state of emergency that unleashed the army into townships, bringing with them untold mayhem and terror that South Africans yearning for a knee-jerk deployment of soliers"to help the police" would do well to recall.
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