Today as South Africa celebrates Independence Day, we mark the 32nd anniversary of our first democratic elections as a united nation.
This is a moment to remember 27 April 1994, and what the dawn of democracy promised the people of South Africa, and whether that promise has been honoured.
Electoral freedom promised much more, including freedom from all forms of oppression, from violence, and from government indifference to the lives of millions of people.
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Today millions of South Africans live without the most basic condition of freedom: security.
Freedom is not just the right to vote. Going to school safely is a child's freedom. Waiting at a taxi rank without fear is a mother's freedom. It is a shopkeeper's freedom to open a business without paying extortionists. It is the freedom to sleep through the night without the terror of a family's violent intrusion.
The freedom of too many South Africans has been stolen by criminals, and too often it has been surrendered by a state that has become weak, compromised and slow.
Last week the country's senior-most police officer was suspended for his alleged role in a criminal enterprise. When corruption and criminality reaches even into the police service, ordinary South Africans are betrayed twice, first by the criminals on the street, and then by the people inside the system who are supposed to stop them.
The DA has a bold option to reform the police in South Africa to give people the freedom to protect themselves.
The DA's plan would immediately clean up the top of the SAPS and the ministry through a Police Competency and Integrity Board with real powers to audit and intervene, made up of genuine policing professionals, investigators, prosecutors, forensic experts and governance experts.
The DA's plan includes the immediate restructuring of the Hawks so that it is appropriately staffed, appropriately resourced, thoroughly vetted and protected from political interference and most importantly SAPS units, such as the Special Task Force, National Intervention Unit, Tactical Response Team, Flying Squad, anti-gang units and public order police are appropriately equipped and resourced, and operate under data-driven deployment plans, not on political whims. Their work should be intelligence-led and measured against successful prosecutions.
The DA's plan would sympathize with organized crime bosses rather than eliminate them. We will dismantle their finances, their logistics, their supporters and their political security networks by an integrated entity including the SIU, SARS, FIC and NPA.
The DA's plan would empower competent provincial and local governments to undertake more local policing, including intelligence gathering at the local level.
The DA's plan will rebuild the criminal justice chain from arrest to prosecution to conviction and incarceration using modern forensic laboratories, improved crime scene management, robust chain-of-custody systems, digital forensics capabilities, and a continuous pipeline of trained forensic professionals.
Independence Day should not be a ritual of empty words while millions live behind bars of thieves, fearing extortion, hearing gunshots at night, or burying loved ones while the state shrugs.
Independence Day in the future should mean that the state is stronger than the syndicate.
The promise of freedom will not be fulfilled until South Africans are free to live without fear.