Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) has noted the 2017/2018 crime statistics released by the Department of Police, but says it's not shocked because crime "has been rampant for three decades due to the incompetent police/law enforcement agencies".
PAC spokesperson Kenneth Mokgatlhe disagreed with Police Minister Bheki Cele, who said "there is no war taking place in this country".
"We do not know how the ministry decides to define war, but we understand war as an absence of peace and stability," Mokgatlhe said.
He emphasised that "our mothers, sisters and wives have lost faith in the law enforcement of this country, instead they choose to continue with their lives because there are hardly no consequences for the perpetrators".
"We are not appalled by the figures that we are seeing being displayed because the situation has been like this for about three decades under the watch of the incompetent police/law enforcement agencies.
"We are told that 57 people are brutally killed every day in this country, but the ministry claims that there is no war; there is war taking place in this country and that is civil war. We do not know how the ministry decides to define war, but we understand war as an absence of peace and stability, which are not there in this country.
"The civil war taking place is between the rich and the poor (haves vs have-nots). It is a war between people of different economic standing/class where the poor use violence as a means of achieving the phase of the upper class. The violent crime that this country experiences is as a result of increasingly growing inequalities, unemployment and abject poverty.
"The only viable solution to addressing our conundrum is by means of addressing the original/real problem, which is the dispossession of wealth so that we strive for egalitarian solution. We cannot place the entire blame on the law enforcement agencies. There is a political crisis which ought to be confronted politically.
"We are now told that more than 100 sexual harassment incidents are reported daily, which are not really the genuine numbers of people experiencing such a trauma.
"Our people are hungry for land so that they can be part of the economy. It would not make sense for someone who is employed to be involved in a robbery because the person is part of the economy.
"Our country is also the haven of alcohol and drugs as the result of poor livelihoods and that affects their thinking in a very gross way."