JONNY STEINBERG: Rates of murder tell the sorry tale of SA

It may be macabre, but it’s true: the changing rate at which people are murdered tells a lucid tale about the country in which they died. And so it is with SA. The arc of its murder statistics since the coming of democracy is, in a profound sense, the arc of the postapartheid story.

In 1994 SA’s murder rate was 64 per 100,000. When democracy came it started falling, and it kept falling every year for 17 years. By 2011, fewer than 30 per 100,000 people were murdered. That is a drop of more than 50%, a staggering decline by any reasonable measure.

Why did the rate at which people kill one another drop so sharply? The early years of the decline were arguably a peace dividend. With the sealing of a political settlement in 1994, the localised civil wars in KwaZulu-Natal, Johannesburg’s East Rand and the Vaal Triangle ended.

But long after these wars were over the murder rate kept going down. The most precipitous annual declines were in fact all in the 2000s. What accounts for them? One possible reason is a simple piece of legislation and its effective enforcement, the Firearms Control Act of 2000.

Reliable data is unfortunately spotty, but for the times and places it is available the evidence is overwhelmingly clear. Richard Matzopoulos’s meticulous analysis of mortuary data collected between 2001 and 2005 in SA’s five largest cities shows that firearm-related homicides declined dramatically during that period relative to homicides committed with knives and blunt objects.

Although the data to prove it isn’t available, it is probable that the murder rate kept going down between 2006 and 2011 for the same reason; public policy was making firearms less available.

It is a heartening story, for it shows that thoughtful public policy supported by legislators and implemented with enthusiasm by bureaucrats can have profound effects in the world. Tens of thousands of people are still waking in the morning and walking the streets because in a corner of SA’s public life, governance worked well.

However, in 2011 the 17-year period of declining murder ended. Since 2012 the murder rate has ticked up every year. It is now 37% higher than it was a decade ago. What happened?

Part of the story is that police enthusiasm for enforcing gun legislation rapidly declined. In an eight-month period between 2010 and 2011 more than 1-million applications for new gun licences and gun-licence renewals were simply fast-tracked, rendering the Firearms Control Act dead in all but name.

But this is just one part of a larger tale. It is no secret that during Jacob Zuma’s tenure as president swathes of the public service deteriorated rapidly. Policing was no exception. On paper it was still there: its budget, its personnel, its equipment. In practice, it began withdrawing from the world. The statistical evidence is glaring: between 2011-12 and 2019-20 the murder conviction rate halved.

It isn’t entirely clear, but it seems that much of the murder increase in the last decade can be attributed not to violence between young men who know one another, which is the profile of most murders everywhere and remains so in SA, but to organised crime, vigilante action and increases in armed robbery. In other words, murder is going up in part because mafias and vigilantes are doing the enforcement work police once did.

It is a salutary story for at least two reasons. The first is that a discussion of murder shows in the bluntest terms how high the stakes are. When bureaucracies stop working literally thousands of people die. The cost in terms of the lives that will not be completed is incalculable.

A second lesson is just how possible it is to put things right. Policing a country with a modicum of competence is well within SA’s grasp. Powerful lobbies are on the brink of effecting a sea change in electricity generation. Where is the powerful lobby forcing a sea change in policing?

• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.