By Neelam Rahim

A year after the deadly riots gripped parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, there was a lack of accountability. On Friday, the Justice, Crime Prevention, and Security Cluster announced that 19 people were arrested for incitement to commit public violence during the riots. Nineteen alleged instigators were arrested, and Police Minister Bheki Cele stated that law enforcement officials were looking into more than 80 people of interest.

Radio Islam speaks to Simon Howell, a criminologist and police expert.

Many find this unacceptable 12 months on, and 19 people out of more than 80 that have been spoken about are also arrested. There is a lot of ambiguity around who they are, what exactly they are being charged with and to what extent the evidence is.

“On the one hand, there is some ambiguity in terms of who has been arrested and why. I think there is a level of political concern there. But equally the other problem is that the state word wants to take these types of cases to court without a firm basis of evidence, and the type of evidence is not as easy to collect as one would normally collect. So I think, they’re trying to build up a case that is watertight, essentially, in a court of the court of law, before pursuing anything more efficiently,” says Simon.

There have been threats from certain political quarters that there could be another round of such violence.

Simon further mentions to Radio Islam that lessons were not learned.

“I think that South Africa remains unprepared for such a large event to occur again. While they may be monitoring things more closely now, the security cluster still haven’t put in place significant or ground level plans that will help or aid a response, beyond local, little sort of strategies. There still remains this concern that at a national level, there needs to be a bigger dialogue about what exactly happened and how effectively to deal with it so shouldn’t ever happen again,” says Simon.

Simon also says, “There has not been effective communication, especially after the initial concern had died down. Their plans would be in the future, or how they would go want to go about preventing such things has not been communicated and as a result, people were left not knowing what may happen in the future.”

Listen to Radio Islam’s podcast below for more on this.