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The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Northern Cape repeats our earlier calls for the provincial government to join hands with communities and NGOs to build safer environments for our youth.

Our youth are often naïve and tend to believe that the dangers of assault, violence, murder, and rape only happens to others and not to themselves. With a general tendency to impulsiveness, recklessness and poor behavioural control combined with crumbling social structures and a lack of support at home or school drives in particular, our youth place themselves in dangerous situations.

Our renewed urgency for greater community safety comes after the brutal murder of Mondre Blom from Keimoes near Upington over the weekend. We share our prayers and our thoughts with the loved ones of this young man, who did not deserve to be stabbed to death.

By all accounts, he was a reliable and loyal friend, a son you could easily send to the shop in the afternoon and know that he wouldn’t go visiting along the way. There was no way of knowing that this day, leaving the home, wouldn’t end like the rest.

The best way to honour Mondre’s memory is simply to step up preventative measures, to increase visible policing efforts over weekends and to ensure that there is proper public order policing training for SAPS. These measures need to be applied especially to areas where the youth gather over weekends.

We need to make a collective effort to improve the safety of our public spaces and give our youth the chance to enjoy happy, healthy, vibrant social lives. Instead, we must work to provide safe alternatives and avoid further victims like 17-year old Itumeleng Witbooi from Postmasburg who was recently stoned to death.

There’s got to be more to life than murder, assault, violence, and death for the youth of our province.

StatsSA show that assault predominantly affects young men older than 16. For every person who dies following an assault, approximately 40 people are physically handicapped or psychologically scarred for the remainder of their lives. When necessary, and if there is a reasonable suspicion that a crime may be about to be committed, SAPS needs to intervene while doing visible policing and ensure that dangerous weapons are confiscated. Knives were used in 62% of the street robberies reported in the 2018/19 financial year, with axes or pangas in a further 5.7%.

At the same time, the provincial government needs to hurry up in joining hands with the community in preventing violence at school level. Bullying and playground fights are also forms of assault which contribute to further aggression later in life. Once again, this illustrates the need for constant psychosocial support at school. Learners must be equipped, at a young age, with the skill to resolve conflict in a non-violent way and not to rely on toxic notions of masculinity later in life.

We cannot let the province become a graveyard for young ones.

Issued by The DA