Your Excellency, former President, it is a great honour to be asked by you and the executive of the Foundation to speak tonight, and it is a great delight to be here with everyone. The Foundation embodies the values that are given for President Kgalema Motlanthe, the stature and authority unrivalled that he enjoys.
I am going to say three things. I will tell you what I am going to say, then I will say it, and then I will wrap up by repeating it. The first is that no problem in our country – none of the issues or difficulties that face us – cannot be solved through our human agency, by which I mean your and my commitment and work. I say this from the work I have done for the last six years, which comes to an end in ten weeks’ time, in the prisons.
The second point is that the path to the correction of our country’s ills lies through institution-building. None of this is original or profound, but it is worth saying.
My third point relates to some of the remarks that Mrs. Motlanthe made in her bold speech, which is that we cannot activate our human energies, or regenerate or create our institutions, without energised and principled leadership.
My first point: nothing is irremediable. There is no problem in our country that we cannot fix. I look at prisons. Our prison system is, in a word, awful. It is not the fault of the National Commissioner and the 37,000 DCS officials who do their work. It is we — the lawyers, the politicians, the commentators, the influence-makers. We made a catastrophic wrong turn in 1998, in our democracy’s first Parliament.
During the Mandela presidency, the parliamentary committee on justice, faced with what they thought—wrongly—was a post-apartheid crime wave, embraced the false promise of more crimes, more prisoners, more prisons, and longer sentences as the solution. The result has been catastrophic.
In 1995, the number of people serving life sentences in South Africa was 495. Tonight, in October 2025, it is 19,000. We are among the biggest imprisoners of lifers in the world, with an 818% increase. The legislation Parliament adopted in 1998 vastly expanded the number of crimes with compulsory life sentences and more than doubled the non-parole period. This applied not only to violent crime but to a whole array of non-violent offences, including fraud, currency, and drug crimes.
The wrong turn was catastrophic for many reasons, and one is easy to express: longer and harsher sentences do not inhibit crime. Many criminological studies over the past century have conclusively established that what reduces crime is not sentence length but effective containment through responsive institutions and accountability.
Instead, we abdicated in favour of a quick-fix illusion: the magic bullet of harsher sentences and more prisons. Our tragedy is that, at the same time as we expanded crimes and sentences and crammed more people into an already dysfunctional system, our institutions of crime containment were radically weakened.
This happened catastrophically when President Mbeki was succeeded by President Jacob Zuma. Almost immediately, he and his enablers set about enfeebling the revenue service, the prosecution authority, the police, and — most crucially — crime intelligence. When he appointed, in 2011, a criminal to head crime intelligence, it never recovered.
From 1994 to 2011, the murder rate went systematically down to its lowest point. From 2011 onwards, it has systematically increased. Today, we have 27,000 murders a year — almost the level of 1994 during the transition to democracy.
I tell this story because it is disturbing, but also because it is fixable. We – the elite — created this problem, and we can solve it. Through the current national commissioner’s reform commitment, we are introducing significant changes. There are solutions, and they lie within our grasp. We can change the way we sentence, the form of the penal system, and, more importantly, we can rebuild the institutions of crime containment.
This leads to my second point: institutions of accountability. Successful crime containment demands effective institutions. Sending more people to overcrowded prisons for longer does not reduce crime. What does is the certainty that if you transgress, you will be detected, pursued, arrested, tried, and sentenced — regardless of how long the sentence is.
Between April 2023 and March 2024, SAPS recorded 27,590 murders. In that same period, the National Prosecuting Authority finalised 3,764 murder cases, of which 3,025 led to convictions. This means that if you commit a murder tonight on the Cape Flats, you have an 89% chance of going unapprehended and unpunished.
NDPP Shamila Batohi has had a wretched job these past seven years, trying to rebuild a prosecution service seeded with criminals and shady characters under Zuma’s administration. Contrast this with the rapid rebuilding of SARS. The disintegration of institutions of criminal inhibition is our national tragedy.
Without effective crime intelligence, criminal syndicates have complete sway. Why do we still not have an honest and responsive crime intelligence agency? Because powerful, rich, and ruthless people rake in billions from violent crime.
The Constitutional Court, under Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, ruled that Parliament and the Executive must create an independent anti-corruption agency with real teeth. It has still not been done — because such an agency would arrest cabinet ministers, commissioners of police, and other members of the elite.
We can, however, create that agency. We can staff and resource it.
My third and final point: to generate cohesive purpose and effective action, and to create strong democratic institutions, we need strong leadership. I do not want to be controversial; I owe my appointment to the Constitutional Court to President Zuma, but even during his brief tenure, the need for leadership was evident.
Minister Naledi Pandor said at the Gertrude Shope Memorial Lecture at UNISA: “There is nothing worse in a country than a leader who has no solution.” She said we seem to be running without a script. She is right.
Our country is confronting its most testing stresses. They demand old resolve — an urgent and imperative need for decisive leadership. If we do not act, we face the risk of an American-style populist revolution, where government, constitution, and the rule of law are trashed in favour of populist myths.
We – the elite — have failed to deliver on the promises we made: access to housing, healthcare, education, water, and jobs. Our failure has bred anger, which we then stigmatise as xenophobia. Yet those we call xenophobes are our people — our neighbours and our poets. We cannot condemn their rage without condemning ourselves.
We must, as a matter of urgency, fulfil our promises to the under-resourced. We must restore our institutions and demand principled, action-oriented leadership that fulfils the promise of the Constitution. We have the pathway, we have the aspirations, and we have the programme of action. It is up to us to see it fulfilled.
Thank you.