South Africans have spent years arguing about farm attacks. One side sees them as a national crisis demanding urgent intervention. The other argues that they are too often presented as evidence of a unique victimhood that obscures broader patterns of violence. The debate is emotionally charged, politically entrenched, and by now deeply familiar.
What strikes me, however, is not what is being said inside the argument, but who is left outside it. A farm worker injured during a labour dispute, a family in Umlazi waiting hours for a police response, or a grandmother in a rural Eastern Cape village struggling to access an FCS detective rarely feature in the national conversation. Their experiences fall into the space between competing political narratives.
That is why I want to propose a different way of thinking about safety in South Africa: one that focuses less on which communities deserve the most sympathy and more on whether the state is reaching vulnerable communities at all.
The problem isn’t that the units don’t exist
South Africa has rural safety structures. We have Stock Theft Units. We have FCS units, Anti-Gang Units, sector policing and Community Policing Forums. On paper, there is a specialist architecture designed to reach communities facing very different forms of violence.
The problem is that this architecture is fragmented, unevenly deployed, and often funded according to historical patterns rather than current concentrations of risk.
Rural safety capacity tends to be more developed in some agricultural regions than others, with significant variation between provinces and policing clusters. Anti-gang policing receives substantial attention in parts of the Western Cape because of the scale of gang violence there, while gang-related crime in other urban centres is often left to general SAPS capacity. FCS units in many rural clusters carry caseloads that make effective investigation extremely difficult. Vehicle fleets are ageing. Detective shortages remain chronic. Community Policing Forums — the mechanism intended to connect residents to police leadership — are highly uneven in effectiveness, with many struggling to remain active in precisely the communities that need them most.
What we have is a system where specialist capacity exists, but not always where it is needed most.
Consider a few numbers. Parliamentary replies have revealed thousands of vacant detective posts across SAPS. At some of the country’s highest-crime stations, around a third of detective posts have reportedly stood vacant. Parliament’s Police Portfolio Committee has repeatedly expressed concern that SAPS remains significantly below its own staffing requirements.
Response times tell a similar story. Depending on the province and policing environment, responses to crimes in progress can vary dramatically. In some areas, victims may wait more than a day for assistance. These are not merely operational statistics. They are indicators of a deeper problem: the distance between vulnerable communities and the institutions meant to protect them.
The figures do not prove that any one community is uniquely neglected. They point to something more important. South Africa’s policing challenge is increasingly one of institutional reach. The state has specialist units, dedicated officers and statutory frameworks. What it often lacks is sufficient capacity in the places where vulnerability is highest and political visibility is lowest.
Three communities, one structural problem
Here’s what I think we’re missing: farm communities, rural black communities, and gang-affected urban communities are being held apart by a political argument when their underlying problem is remarkably similar. Not the same threat — these are genuinely different forms of violence requiring different operational responses. But the same structural neglect. Under-resourced clusters. Slow response times. Inadequate investigative capacity. Weak victim support systems.
Individually, these communities possess very different levels of political leverage. Organised farming groups can often secure national attention. Rural black communities, farm workers, and residents of gang-affected townships or informal settlements frequently struggle to do the same.
This is why I think they need to be understood as a bloc — not operationally, but for the purposes of budget advocacy and political accountability.
Call it a Rural and Underserved Communities Safety Fund. Ring-fenced. Disbursed through a Treasury-administered framework against approved policing and community safety plans. Protected by expenditure conditions that prevent funds from simply being absorbed into general operational budgets.
What this actually looks like
The fund doesn’t replace existing structures. It doesn’t create a new command hierarchy. It doesn’t force a single policing doctrine onto incompatible situations. A rural Limpopo cluster dealing with stock theft, farm attacks and broad intimate partner and family violence requires a very different operational plan from a Cape Flats cluster dealing with territorial gang violence.
The fund accommodates this by requiring each participating cluster to submit a threat profile and operational plan before receiving funding.
What changes is how resources are allocated. Too often, policing resources are distributed through historical patterns that struggle to adapt to changing realities on the ground. The Rural and Underserved Communities Safety Fund would introduce a complementary allocation mechanism tied to measurable indicators such as crime density, response-time performance, FCS caseload ratios, and broader community safety indicators.
High-need clusters receive more support. Clusters that already possess stronger institutional capacity receive proportionally less from this particular funding stream.
Two commitments built into the architecture strike me as non-negotiable.
First, a social crime-prevention floor. A minimum of 15% of every disbursement should support interventions such as gang diversion programmes, victim support services, community forum reconstruction, violence prevention initiatives and legal assistance. Enforcement alone has repeatedly shown its limits in communities where trust in the state is already weak. Building prevention into the funding model is not charity; it is operational common sense.
Second, a farm worker inclusion clause. Farm workers experience significant exposure to violent crime and labour-related vulnerabilities, yet their experiences are often absent from public discussions of rural safety. Any rural cluster receiving funding should be required to demonstrate that a meaningful portion of interventions directly benefit farm workers and farmworker communities. Whether that threshold is ultimately 20% or another figure should be informed by consultation and evidence, but the principle should be non-negotiable: rural safety cannot be discussed as though farm workers are invisible.
The political risk worth naming
I’m not naive about the coalition politics here.
Some organised farming groups may resist the grouping on the grounds that their specific crisis is being diluted. Some township communities may be suspicious that their safety concerns are being instrumentalised to provide political cover for a discourse they have long experienced as racially charged.
Both concerns are legitimate.
The answer is not to pretend they don’t exist. The answer is to be clear about what this proposal is and what it is not.
This is not an identity claim. It is not an argument that these communities experience the same forms of violence. It is not an attempt to create a hierarchy of suffering.
It is an advocacy and budget framework built around a shared structural problem: communities with high levels of vulnerability and low levels of institutional reach.
These communities are not being asked to see themselves as the same. They are being asked to recognise that there is more political leverage in addressing structural neglect together than separately.
Framing matters enormously here. The argument needs to be about structural neglect, not shared victimhood.
Why this may not require a new Act of Parliament
One of the first objections that will arise is legislative: don’t we need a new law for this?
Not necessarily.
The SAPS Act already provides for specialist policing structures and community policing arrangements. Existing legislation also provides for civilian oversight mechanisms and advisory structures. National Treasury already administers conditional and performance-linked transfers through the annual budget and Division of Revenue framework, demonstrating that government can create ring-fenced funding mechanisms without establishing entirely new institutions.
The precise design would matter. Some elements could likely be implemented through the budget process, Treasury frameworks, SAPS policy directives and existing statutory powers. More ambitious governance arrangements might require amendments to existing legislation or adjustments to the Division of Revenue framework.
But the broader point remains: the institutional building blocks already exist. This is not a proposal that requires government to start from scratch.
What would be required is political will, administrative coordination and an oversight mechanism with sufficient independence and credibility to ensure that funding reaches its intended purpose.
The argument we should be having
I am tired of watching safety in South Africa function as a zero-sum competition for sympathy.
Tired of farm attack debates that erase farm workers.
Tired of gang violence discourse that treats affected communities as backdrops rather than constituents.
Tired of rural black South Africans being statistically and politically invisible in both conversations.
The Rural and Underserved Communities Safety Fund is not a silver bullet. Underfunding is not the only problem. Capacity, corruption, leadership failures and institutional culture matter enormously too.
But it is a structural intervention that would stop treating political leverage as a proxy for need. It would build accountability into resource allocation, and force a conversation about farm workers, rural communities and gang-affected residents that the current system consistently avoids.
We know how to design mechanisms like this. The institutional frameworks largely exist. The question is whether there is sufficient political appetite to stop having the familiar argument and start building something that reaches the people who need it.
I think there is.
And I think the moment for it is now.
[Image: https://www.saps.gov.za/resource_centre/publications/photo_album/images/Img023.jpg]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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