Martin van Staden: A reluctant defence of Lesufi's AmaPanyaza initiative

Key topics:Lesufi acted unilaterally to fight Gauteng’s crime via AmaPanyaza wardens.DA and FF+ undermined decentralisation by opposing Lesufi’s initiative.Federalist precedent for provincial law enforcement was lost amid politics..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Martin van Staden*.What’s worse? The uncomfortable association created by centraliser-in-chief Panyaza Lesufi coming within inches of pulling off a great feat of decentralisation, or the fact that his failure was orchestrated in large part by some of South Africa’s foremost “federalist” parties?Lesufi has been a disaster for South African politics.First as Gauteng’s MEC for Education and then Premier, Lesufi has always embodied the worst impulses of the African National Congress (ANC): a relentless assault on private property and individual liberty, particularly in the realm of educational choice. Lesufi has a track record of illiberal politics that makes you wonder how anyone with a pulse could have voted him into power.The Democratic Alliance (DA), in particular, bears a lot of blame here. The DA put Lesufi in the Premier’s office after the 2024 election, handing the keys to a man whose instincts scream centralised control and ideological overreach.Panyaza Lesufi should not be, and should never have been, the Premier of Gauteng. Period.Punishment for being right for onceBut here is the uncomfortable part: on one issue, and seemingly one issue only, Lesufi got it right in principle. Dead right.In a country drowning in violent crime, where the South African Police Service (SAPS) lumbers along like a corrupt, incompetent, and too-often malicious behemoth, Lesufi shrugged his shoulders and acted.He launched the Gauteng Crime Prevention Wardens (derisively nicknamed AmaPanyaza by critics) to tackle the province’s spiralling lawlessness.Lesufi says he requested 10,000 additional cops from SAPS, to be paid for by Gauteng, with the predictable answer being “no”. AmaPanyaza was “Plan B”, he says, if SAPS failed to act..Read more:.Lesufi suspends officials over financial misconduct probe, defends delay on Health HoD's lifestyle audit.This is a rare admission from an ANC heavyweight: the central government’s policing monopoly is not simply failing, it is lethally incompetent and obstructive.Lesufi’s move was far from perfect. The “wardens” were hastily assembled (not to mention weirdly named), and failed to produce any kind of tangible results out the gate.Crime is one of those things you do not have to wait for to see results. An effective crime-fighting strategy or institution would deliver from the jump. Criticising SAPS and taking the initiative, only to fail to match their already disastrous record, will never do.But the principle is the right one: take whatever action is possible and reasonable to interpose in the violent-crime crisis.This all started to fall apart when AmaPanyaza was slammed as illegal by Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner, during his testimony before Parliament in October.The Public Protector’s report echoed this.Lesufi conceded as much, announcing the AmaPanyaza’s disbandment amid the backlash.Yes, the execution was sloppy (we are still dealing with Panyaza Lesufi, after all), and by failing to show immediate superiority over the status quo alternative, AmaPanyaza doomed itself.And if it was simply AmaPanyaza’s ridiculous execution that was being criticised, it would be commendable. It is not. The principle – the question of lawfulness – is front and centre.Strip away the procedural fumbles of AmaPanyaza, and what is left is a precedent worth protecting.Solving the problem, not waiting for authorisationGauteng is home to over a quarter of South Africa’s population, the country’s economic heartbeat, and like the Western Cape, is an utter criminal wasteland.The people of this province cannot be expected to wait for Pretoria’s permission to survive criminality.Lesufi did what decentralists have begged for, for years: he decentralised from the bottom up.He empowered a province to shoulder law enforcement where the centre had abdicated.This is not an endorsement of Lesufi-the-ideologue. It is a recognition that, in this instance, he modelled the “doing versus asking” ethos that my colleagues and I at the Free Market Foundation (FMF) have hammered home through our Campaign for Home Rule.For the uninitiated, Home Rule is the FMF’s practical and legal blueprint for applied federalism.South Africa’s 1996 Constitution is not the unitary straitjacket the ANC (and Lesufi in other contexts) pretends it is, but a formally federal framework waiting for federalist substance.We have urged communities and opposition-led provincial and municipal governments to take advantage of this: fill potholes, erect community safety institutions sans central oversight, and, yes, innovate on law enforcement.Ask forgiveness, not permission.Businesses in suburbs and townships are already stepping up. Private security firms partner with entrepreneurs and residents to reclaim streets.Why not municipalities, why not provinces? Because the ANC says “no”?We have singled out the Western Cape in particular, as it is home to some of South Africa’s most violent areas, and offers a rare opportunity given the lack of ANC administration since 2009. It is a prime testing ground.KwaZulu-Natal, with its interesting coalition dynamics, could also start taking the initiative.The Western Cape’s Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) in conjunction with the City of Cape Town is a very solid start, deploying officers to high-crime zones and showing real results. But it lacks scale and, in some key respects, ambition.Imagine if Premier Alan Winde had seized Lesufi’s precedent with both hands and rolled out a full Western Cape police auxiliary force, trained and funded locally and by the private sector, to supplement SAPS or existing municipal police departments.Or if KwaZulu-Natal’s Thami Ntuli took Sakeliga’s cue and established a provincial highway patrol along the N3 corridor – one of South Africa’s key economic arteries.This could have been a bottom-up revolution in law enforcement: opposition parties proving decentralisation works in practice, chipping away at decades of ANC centralism.This could have been a political goldmine.Voters would have seen tangible safety gains, which would have boosted opposition credibility. Only policy wonks and paralegals inside the DA and other parties believe that voters care about solving crime only after the ANC’s formalistic boxes have been ticked. Voters will reward risky moves that produce results.Instead, we have seen utter betrayal from the very parties we thought were allies in this fight.Another DA own-goalThe DA, self-proclaimed federalists, pounced on Lesufi’s missteps to table a motion of no confidence against him in late October. The party’s provincial leader, Solly Msimanga, crowed that Lesufi’s meek disbandment of the AmaPanyaza confirmed that it was never legitimate.This was the one area in which the DA should rather have put itself at Lesufi’s service and asked: “How can we fix your disastrous rollout and ensure it does not undermine law enforcement decentralisation across the country, Mr Premier?”One might counter that this is “bad politics”, but reconsider that in light of the fact that it was the DA that, unprovoked, seconded Lesufi’s nomination as Premier in 2024. Bad politics!AmaPanyaza’s establishment was messy, but the motion of no confidence is not about process. It is punishment for daring to act unilaterally.By piling on, the DA is not simply scoring cheap points that mean nothing to voters, it is affirming the centralisation Lesufi usually champions, the very centralisation that made addressing South Africa’s crime problems next to impossible without the ANC’s eager cooperation (perish the notion).We will not act unless Pretoria says so, the DA’s stance screams (again).For a party whose manifesto touts federal devolution, this is a betrayal of their base, where (especially in the Western Cape) residents crave more provincial policing autonomy, not less. And it hands the ANC a gift: proof that even reformers will voluntarily bow before the centre without the centre having even truly resisted.The DA has made its own governance more difficult through publicity own-goals before. The two prominent ones I can think of are:1. The DA defining “championing the rule of law” as synonymous with “obeying ANC legislation”. Thus, whenever there is a call for civil disobedience – a globally recognised, perfectly legitimate means of protest – DA insiders would whisper that they cannot participate because they are known as the “rule of law party”. Racialised policy is law, John Steenhuisen shamefully lectured Sakeliga in February, as if anyone is supposed to be impressed by this obsequity.2. The DA going too hard on cadre deployment. “Cadre deployment” is a clunky ANC name for something absolutely normal in the democratic world: newly elected administrations placing their own people in key government positions to prosecute the administration’s agenda. Now whenever the DA rightly tries to appoint someone from its own ranks to a position in government, it is accused of hypocrisy after spending decades attacking cadre deployment. It then gets tangled up in word games with its critics. DA voters want DA people in government..Read more:.Woode-Smith calls for federal autonomy: SA’s need for decentralised governance.In both cases, they tied their own hands for negligible gain. That rings true today as well.What is the FF+ doing?Worse still is the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), whose entire brand hinges on self-determination and decentralisation.Their newsletter of 31 October 2025 evoked some ideological whiplash.The FF+’s Gauteng team welcomed AmaPanyaza’s disbandment, calling the programme “illegal, impractical, and dangerous” due to the lack of adequate “training” and the unclear “mandate” the law enforcers would have wielded in the field. Fair enough.But the party goes on to submit that the Constitution “clearly provides” that the SAPS is “exclusively” responsible for the “prevention, combating, and investigation of crime”, and that provinces have no mandate to establish “parallel police forces”.Whereas the DA always complains about “who will fund a provincial police force?”, the FF+ acknowledges but then criticises the fact that the Gauteng Provincial Government was funding its AmaPanyaza.The FF+ (the FF+!) then says, “What Gauteng needs is not parallel structures, but professional, accountable officials with a lawful mandate to offer support to the [SAPS].”The FF+, the party of minority self-determination, rejecting the very notion of a parallel structure? For what earthly reason?The Constitution does not, nor has it ever, provided that there may only be a single police service for the whole country. It sends chills up my federalist body that the very tip of the spear of self-determination politics in South Africa has made such a constitutionally ungrounded concession.Section 199(1) of the Constitution provides that there is a “single police service” for “the Republic”.If the same provision provided that, “The Republic has only one coat of arms.”, would that also be interpreted as a prohibition on the Western Cape or Gauteng having their own coats of arms? Of course not.It has never been disputed, by anyone, that the SAPS is the lawful monopoly police service of the central sphere of government. But for the FF+ to say this means provinces and implicitly municipalities may not constitutionally preside over public safety structures, is off the reservation.This interpretation is precisely what the ANC wants the Constitution to mean. Why are federalists giving it exactly what it wants?The FF+ knows this. They have campaigned on self-determination and federalism for decades. Yet here they are, echoing Mkhwanazi’s absolutism, bolstering the chorus for AmaPanyaza’s closure.This is not just philosophically inconsistent, but actively counterproductive. The FF+’s minority and often rural constituents want local solutions, not lectures on unitary purity and obeying the ANC’s constitutional preferences.By siding with centralists, the FF+ is not defending the rule of law, but undermining what could have been a very useful precedent that could have empowered their own communities.Political theatre with consequencesWhile the DA, FF+, and others think they are simply engaging in political theatre, scoring points against their partisan opponents, what they have done is deal a body blow to the cause of decentralisation in South Africa.This could have been one of the few justifiable examples of cross-party unity, where parties like the DA and FF+ take hands with some in the ANC and present a united front on a key issue of national concern. Alas!The DA and FF+ approach is utterly useless to mothers burying their children in Mitchell’s Plain and farmers in the North West patrolling their property after the SAPS told them off.In light of the centre’s malice and collapse, communities and subnational spheres need to assert their own authority to stop the decay. Lesufi’s gambit, flaws and all, embodied that spirit, even if he did it for all the wrong reasons.The irony stings: an ANC premier, of all people, set a bottom-up federalist precedent, only for “pro-decentralisation” parties to help undo it.This pile-on does not just punish Lesufi. It entrenches the waiting game that has killed thousands over many years.Gauteng’s crime stats alone are grim. Yet the “reformers” demand… more begging at the feet of Bheki Cele, Senzo Mchunu, or Firoz Cachalia? How disappointing.Panyaza Lesufi should be removed from office for all manner of reasons. This was not it.And mark my words: whenever it is put to the DA, FF+, or other so-called federalist parties in the future that they must take the initiative in law enforcement, they will point back to the “AmaPanyaza debacle” as a reason not to, but omit to mention that it was precisely their own-goal during the debacle that turned it into a cautionary tale..*Martin van Staden is the Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation and former Deputy Head of Policy Research at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR). Martin also serves as the Editor of the IRR’s History Project and its Race Law Project, and is an advisor to the Free Speech Union SA. He is pursuing a doctorate in law at the University of Pretoria. For more information visit www.martinvanstaden.com..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

Martin van Staden: A reluctant defence of Lesufi's AmaPanyaza initiative

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