EMSIE FERREIRA, Johannesburg | Thursday
FIVE people have died at the hands of vigilantes in as many days in Johannesburgs townships as mob justice becomes an increasingly familiar sight in crime-weary South African communities.
A newspaper picture published this week of a naked, dying man and an angry mob summed up the scale of the problem. The photographer managed to stop angry residents of Orange Farm from setting 19-year-old would-be thief Kinos Hlatshwayo alight, but he died in hospital from the beating they had given him for stealing a woman’s jewellery.
The list of mob killings committed in the past three months is long – from the handbag snatcher who was bludgeoned to death with a wheelspanner to the four suspected cattle thieves shot dead by a 60-strong mob in eastern KwaZulu-Natal province.
“The recent events we have witnessed are indications of something that has been going on for a while. Vigilantism has been on the increase in South Africa since 1996,” said Makubetse Sekhonyane, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies.
It was fueled, he said, by police inefficiency and the perception that the courts fail to deliver justice.
Sekhonyane said communities he had interviewed countrywide complain that the police do not respond to crime fast enough, and when they do victims receive little feedback on criminal cases.
“Vigilantism is seen as swift and people can see the results immediately, the other way around takes forever and the results are hard to see.”
Rough justice was even more popular in South Africa’s vast rural areas than in its townships, he added, because police were thinner on the ground.
In the Eastern Cape province this has spawned the Umfela anti-stocktheft vigilante group and in the Northern Province, Mapogo-a-Mathamaga, who are feared for the beatings they mete out.
In Cape Town’s poor suburbs, the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) is estimated by intelligence services to have killed 25 drug-peddling gangsters in two years, starting with the lynching of gang boss Rashaad Staggie in front of his stronghold in 1996.
There are no figures for mob revenge but Sekhonyane believes the police are breaking the back of organised vigilante structures, aided by a community backlash against them.
“What is more worrying in South Africa today is the ad-hoc incidents of mob justice,” Sekhonyane said. “I think there are many more cases that go unreported.” – AFP