THE emergence of the anti crime movement, People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) has touched a nerve in South Africa and put the African National Congress led government on the defensive.
Since PAGAD burst into public consciousness a fortnight ago when its zealots shot and burned to death the alleged gangster, Rashaad Staggie, outside his home in Salt River, near Cape Town, kindred vigilante movements have sprung up in most of South Africa's main cities, including Port Elizabeth, Durban, Johannesburg and Pretoria.
The vigilante movements some of which have adopted the name of the original Cape Town based PAGAD signal a loss of faith in the ability of the government, the Ministry of Safety and Security, and the South African Police Service, to contain crime.
Perhaps the single clearest indicator of the crisis is the decision by the Justice Minister, Mr Dullah Omar, to move out of the home he has occupied for years in Cape Town after threats from angry vigilantes because of the perceived failures of the judicial criminal system.
It is seen as evidence that the police cannot even guarantee the safety of a high ranking cabinet minister.
As the Johannesburg based Sunday Times observed. "By moving out of his home... the Minister of Justice demolished all the government's arguments that it is winning the war against crime." A recent national survey, commissioned by a leading bank, shows that nearly half of South Africa's adult population regards crime as the gravest problem facing the country, superseding even the declining rand (which fell to an all time low of 4.57 to the US dollar last Friday).
PAGAD and kindred vigilante movements aside, public opinion on the death penalty shows the government is out of kilter with popular feeling there is strong support in all sectors of the population for the reinstitution of the death penalty for murder, but the ANC is fiercely against capital punishment, insisting the right to life is the "most basic human right of all" and that it is an "essential building block of a human rights culture."
It is unfair to place sole responsibility on the government for the rising crime rate. As sociologist Mark Shaw notes in a recent paper "Most serious crimes, notably murder, robbery and housebreaking, began to increase from the mid 1980s onwards." But Nelson Mandela's government has not succeeded in halting, let alone reversing, the spiral.
Peter Leon, a leader of the opposition Democratic Party, describes South Africa under the ANC as the "most murderous society on earth, with a murder per capita rate nine times the international norm." Mr Shaw, writing of the present situation, says "The position has reached serious proportions. The approximately 21,000 crime related deaths during 1995 outnumbered deaths from motor vehicle accidents by two to one."
The Muslim based PAGAD has been accused of wanting to impose its version of Islamic law on South Africa, with eye for an eye punitive values. But these attitudes are not confined to the small 350,000 strong Muslim community. The sister of one of the latest murder victims German businessman Erich Ellmer, who was shot dead in his driveway by would be hijackers has similar feelings. She wants murderers, hijackers, rapists and drug peddlers to be executed in public. She chastises Mr Omar for "fleeing" from his home. "We cannot do that," she says. "We have to live with the high crime rate in our communities."
