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‘Structural and systemic changes needed when vacant senior positions in SSA are filled’

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Political analyst, Ongama Mtimka believes that structural and systemic changes are needed when vacant senior positions in the State Security Agency (SSA) and the police’s crime intelligence department are filled.

He was reacting to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address in which he said cabinet accepts full responsibility for the July unrest that claimed more than 350 lives and cost the economy about R50 billion.

Mtimka says the president needs to use different departments more efficiently and he himself should provide greater leadership.

He says, “Just changing leaders would suggest to me that the president has got a mistaken rockstar approach to fixing our problems. I think the president’s creating of task teams takes the easy way out instead of actually applying himself to the works of departments and supporting departments in fulfilling their roles in ways that got legacy impact on those departments’ processes. I doubt that these task teams have a legacy impact on the system and you cannot live by creating parallel institutions to government.”

Expert panel

In his address, Ramaphosa vowed to develop a national response to address all the weaknesses, that the expert panel appointed to review the country’s response to the July Unrest have identified.

He announced the appointment of an Expert Panel to look into the country’s response to the unrest.

The panel found among others that Cabinet must take full responsibility for the violence.  Ramaphosa says they take the blame and will make necessary changes.

He says, “Earlier this week, we released the report of the expert panel into the civil unrest in July last year. The report paints a deeply disturbing picture of the capabilities of our security services and the structures that exist to coordinate their work. The report concludes that government’s initial handling of the July 2021 events was inept, police operational planning was poor, there was poor coordination between the state security and intelligence services, and police are not always embedded in the communities they serve.”

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech:

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