The recent brutal murder of a university student and the shooting of a soccer coach by a referee have rekindled the long-running debate about gun control in South Africa.
The debate heightened after the body of Leigh Matthews, who was kidnapped on July 9, was found dumped in South Africa’s commercial hub, Johannesburg, nearly two weeks later. Police said the 21-year-old university student had been shot.
Just a week later a soccer referee pulled a gun and shot dead a coach for questioning one of his rulings during a match that had been ridden with controversy, police say.
The incident happened in the Eastern Cape province after the referee gave a yellow warning card to a player in a local match on July 24.
Inspector Mali Govender of the Grahamstown police in the Eastern Cape told reporters ”the referee became threatened when the other team approached him because they were angry. So he pulled out a gun and killed the coach of the visiting team.”
Gun-related violence claims about 10 000 people in South Africa each year, according to the campaign group Gun-Free South Africa.
Susan Shabangu, Deputy Minister of Safety and Security, told about 100 activists marking the Global Week of Action against Small Arms and Light Weapons in Johannesburg this month that criminal gangs possess 25 000 illegal guns and 1,6-million rounds of ammunition in South Africa.
But independent sources believe the figure could be anywhere between 500 000 and four million.
To reduce gun-related crimes, a new firearms law came into force in South Africa, which has one of the highest rates of gun-related crime in the world.
Under the law, introduced on July 1, more than two million gun owners will have to reapply for their licences, undergo stringent checks and sit for a competency examination. The new Firearms Control Act also raises the legal age for owning a firearm from 16 to 21. South Africa’s Gun Owners’ Association, which is opposed to the new regulations, failed to persuade the court to stop the Bill.
”South Africa is leading the way. We hope other African countries will follow soon,” Hannah Yilma, director of the United Nations Information Centre in the capital, Pretoria, told the Johannesburg gathering.
For the new law to work, Shabangu urged South Africans to work closely with the police.
”If not controlled, these guns will eventually threaten our democracy,” she warned, referring to the country’s fledgling democracy, introduced after the demise of apartheid in 1994.
So far, 16 African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Liberia, have joined the campaign against small arms and light weapons.
”We ask the unarmed majority in South Africa to stand up to support the firearm control campaign,” said Chemist Khumalo of the Global Week of Action.
In 2002, arms deliveries to Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa constituted 66,7% of the value of all arms deliveries worldwide, with a monetary value of nearly $17-billion, according to a June 2004 report titled Guns or Growth?, compiled by Amnesty International, Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms.
The main culprits are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, the United States, Russia, China and France — who accounted for 90 of those deliveries, it said.
The guns are being sold, said the report, across the four regions where ”more than a billion people struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day; one child in five did not complete primary school; more than 14-million children lost one or both parents to Aids in 2001; nearly 800-million people suffered from chronic hunger; and half a million women died in pregnancy or childbirth”.
The report is also concerned about the implications of US President George Bush’s war on terror.
For 2004, it said, the US State Department set aside $4,7-billion for counter-terrorism, compared with $2-billion for programmes for the war against poverty.
The amount includes military assistance to the so-called ”frontline states” — a group of 25 countries that includes the Philippines, Afghanistan and Yemen. These nations threw their weight behind the current US counter-terrorism campaign.
The aid will arrive in the form of military services, equipment and training, the report said.
Bernd Pirrung, director of the Goethe Institute, a German language centre in Johannesburg, said Germany and France refused to send troops to Iraq because of their history.
”Germany and France suffered the most from World War I and II. That’s why they didn’t send soldiers to Iraq. We don’t want to go through another war,” he told the gathering.
Small and light guns are a big problem in Africa. They have devastated Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, the DRC, Burundi, Rwanda, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Mozambique, Angola and Chad since the 1960s.
”I witnessed three major wars in my country, Ethiopia,” said Yilma. ”Wars affect the poor, mainly women and children.”
According to her, the world is awash with 500-million small and light arms.
”It’s like drugs, the traffickers are well organised. We should not give up. We should continue fighting them,” Hannah said.
Shabangu said the ongoing gun-collection exercise should go hand-in-hand with efforts to combat poverty. More than 350-million people, or more than 50% of Africa’s population, are living below the poverty line of $1 a day, according to the World Bank.
”We must address the core problems of poverty, unemployment. If we don’t, [gun-related] problems will persist,” she warned. — IPS