The black-gold bold letters with telephone numbers announcing who to call if you need armed response to a crime look a bit out of place on a White City, Soweto, street.
White City is traditionally one of the roughest Soweto townships and also its poorest.
Yet, for locals here and in other areas of Soweto, advertising boards signal that “whingeing” about crime and the lack of adequate response from the police, is not the strictly suburban — meaning white — concern it is sometimes reduced to.
Armed security patrol cars are becoming a common sight at the filling stations and other strategic spots around Soweto. They bear the logos of established and one-man operations.
As with many townships, Soweto is straining under crime and locals are doing whatever they can, legally, to protect themselves. Churches have not been spared. The Catholic Church in Dobsonville has, after being burgled three times in 18 months, decided to put its faith in the hands of an armed security company. This after thieves have broken through security doors and made off with fax machines, copiers and computers from the church office.
The decision to provide all Gauteng schools with computers coincided with the criminals’ intention to rob such schools of the equipment as soon as it arrived.
As a result, most schools with computer facilities also have an armed security company on call. So do clinics and libraries.
Tiny Maqoma, who runs Burglar Alert’s Soweto franchise, says when the franchise started operations in Soweto in 1998, most of its clients were local business people or those who needed security systems for their cars.
These days households and “even people who live in backrooms” want the assurance that someone will respond to their cries should they fall victim to crime.
“People here have lost confidence in the police,” says Maqoma. “They are tired of having to wait for hours for police response.”
His company uses one car during the day and four patrolling four areas around the vast township at night.
“Most crimes, such a armed robberies, happen at night or early mornings. For some clients, we are at their business when they close at night or open in the mornings because most robberies are inside jobs where the thugs know when the best time to rob is,” says Maqoma.
But the security sector is not totally free of the defects in the criminal justice system.
“You would think I am joking but sometimes we arrest people, say with a stolen television set, and when you get to the police station, you find cops not really interested in incarcerating the guy but calling each other to watch TV,” says Maqoma. The need for armed response “fluctuates like the rand”, he says. The criminal justice system also provides one of the great disincentives for locals to take up membership with security companies.
“Sometimes you apprehend a guy in someone else’s property but the next thing you see him walking the street, passing remarks at our guys, calling them mere abomantjingilane [a disparaging term for security guards derived from ‘marching in line’].”
For Maqoma, doing his bit to reduce crime is not only an entrepreneurial endevour, it is also a way of ensuring that a few more young men who otherwise would have been idle and a security threat earn a decent living.
“These youngsters are ambitious and do their best to deal with tsotsis. They are not people from Lesotho or Zimbabwe, they are from these communities and want to improve things for themselves and their communities.”