“Minister Bheki Cele should sign his letter of resignation and vacate his office,” said Tshepi Mmekwa, Action Centre coordinator at Action Society. “We’ve written it for him and delivered it to his office since he is so busy with imbizos and showboating on TV. We now await his signature.”
Minister Cele has failed in every target set for him by President Ramaphosa. Seeing as the president won’t evaluate the minister’s performance, we did it for him and realised a letter of resignation was the only solution. In the letter, Action Society highlights Cele’s failures as Minister of Police, including the rising murder rate, which is the highest it has ever been, translating to three murders per hour.
Even though the government and Minister Cele vow to eradicate violence against women and children every year, the rate of sexual offences started increasing when Cele took over as minister and reached a staggering 53 295 during 2020/21. Unfortunately, this year seems to be even worse.
Action Society also listed some other failures as reasons for the minister to quit his job:
- Failure to decrease armed robbery;
- Failure to reduce the number of hijackings;
- Failure to act on intelligence riots and cash-in-transit heists; and
- Failure to adequately deal with the DNA backlog.
“The minister admitted this week that the crime statistics ‘does not look good’,” said Mmekwa. “We are glad that he finally sees the problem and urge him to do the right thing and leave.”
Action Society has long campaigned for the minister to leave or be sacked as he is failing miserably in ridding the country of crime. More than 130 000 people have signed our petition to support this campaign (https://actionsociety.co.za/cele-must-go/).
