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I will be writing to the Minister of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries, Senzeni Zokwana, and Minister of Police, Nathi Nhleko, asking them by what date plans for specialised rural safety units, long promised to South Africans, will actually be rolled out.

The DA is concerned about the South African Police Service’s (SAPS) commitment to rural safety following their inability to account for farm attack statistics in Parliament’s Police Portfolio Committee yesterday.

While SAPS claimed that serious rural crime decreased by 41% from 2011/12 to 2013/14, they were unable to account for actual farm murders and attacks as the statistics for rural crime are no longer broken down into specific categories by SAPS.

Farm attacks and murders, as a category of rural crime, in fact appear to be on the rise according to a recent Institute for Security Studies (ISS) report.

Quoting stats from TAU-SA, the only available source of figures for murders and attacks since SAPS stopped keeping record, the report shows a year on year increase in attacks:

2013 – 62 Murders and 231 Attacks
2014 – 67 Murders and 278 Attacks
2015 –  9 Murders and 23 attacks so far this year

ISS further stated that the TAU-SA figures are likely to under-represent the number of farm attacks given that the body does not have the same record-gathering resources available to SAPS.

It must further be noted that the 2015 figures in the ISS report, while already high, do not even account for recent murders, including that of 72 year old Toon Swanepoel and his 70 year old wife Rienie who were attacked and tortured to death on their farm near Bloemfontein last month. Even more recently, a KZN farmer, Terrence Rizzato, was senselessly killed on Tuesday by a group of armed suspects who stormed his farm residence and murdered him execution style.

The SAPS removed the reporting of attacks on farmers and farm workers from their Annual Report some years ago and, despite instructions from the Portfolio Committee, they have steadfastly refused to reintroduce these figures.  The DA again raised this issue in the committee only for National Police Commissioner (NPC) Riah Piyega to respond that she had no knowledge of past instructions. 

Until pressed by myself and colleague, DA Shadow Minister of Police, Dianne Kohler Barnard MP, the SAPS deliberately avoided referring to murders and attacks in farming communities in their presentation.

The DA has requested that the relevant minutes of the Portfolio Committee be forwarded to the NPC so that she cannot claim to be uninformed of the Committee’s instructions for farm attack figures to be reintroduced in the Annual Report.

The numbers of commercial farmers have already declined by over 50% since 1996, threatening national food security.  For the first time in this country’s history we now teeter on the brink of being a net food importer. The least we can do for this industry is to keep proper record of their safety, and to take decisive steps to increase safety in rural areas through specialised policing units.

Issued by DA