Farm Murders and Attacks Dominate Parliament Debate

On Thursday, Parliament hosted a Debate of National Importance on the Recent Scourge of Farm Attacks and Murders initially tabled by the Democratic Alliance (DA). The official opposition party’s Shadow Minister of State Security, Dianne Kohler Barnard, led the charge for intensified law enforcement operations aimed at protecting farmers and farmworkers, arguing that the agricultural sector had been hard-hit by the recent crime wave.

Kohler Barnard added that Police Minister Bekhi Cele had failed the farming community by disbanding localised patrol units and that, now, a farmer was “three times more likely to be murdered than a police officer. Kohler Barnard noted:

“The men and women who feed South Africa don’t sleep. They do nightly patrols around their farms, and I know of wives who watch their husbands on cameras as they do their patrols in the dark. Watching for attackers, waiting to see if tonight is the night their beloved husband will be killed.”