The news from South Africa is grim, though scarcely surprising to those who have watched the slow, grinding collapse of post-apartheid governance. A mass shooting, bodies piling up in a township, and the usual chorus of politicians mouthing sorrow while doing precisely nothing. But this time, the blood has splashed onto British hands, for this tragedy puts our vaunted ‘security sector reform’ programme under an ugly spotlight.
We have been pouring millions into training, equipment, and ‘capacity building’ for the South African Police Service. And what do we have to show for it? A state that cannot protect its own citizens from the very criminals we claim to have disarmed.
The echoes of the late Roman Empire are deafening: a metropolis hiring barbarians to police its borders, only to find them feckless or worse. Our reform agenda is not merely failing; it is a farce, a bureaucratic theatre designed to soothe liberal consciences while the real rot deepens. One must ask: are we propping up a government that has lost the will to govern?
Or are we, in our hubris, simply funding the next wave of corruption? The answers are uncomfortable, but they must be faced. Until we stop treating security reform as a box-ticking exercise and acknowledge the ethnic and cultural fractures beneath, we will continue to see these reports.
And we will deserve every condemnation that follows.
