Ernst Roets
speaker
479 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Ernst Roets’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It would be imprisonment. We don't have the death penalty.
Well, I'm honestly, seriously, I'm more concerned if the question is about safety, about mob justice in South Africa than the actual government coming after you. Of course. So what does that look like? Well, we have... I think you reported on this in 2021, I think, when there was this massive riots in South Africa. In Durban. In Durban. I remember that.
Yeah, it sort of spilled out to Gauteng, to Johannesburg, to a lesser extent. And it's just people, it's almost like, you know, smelling blood and becoming extremely violent. And people join in by the thousands.
So someone, a friend from Europe once asked me, are you not afraid that the government's going to come to your house and take your stuff? And my honest answer is not that much. I'm more concerned about a mob showing up. So then what do you do? Well, if you are alone, you can't do anything.
If you're a well-functioning, well-organized community, then the community, you can call people on the radio. You can get the community to take a stance. And I think that's one of the things. So you don't get lynched.
It's not so much white people who are targeted.
No, blacks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's certainly, it has happened in the previous dispensation. It's still happening to an extent, not as much as in the past, but people don't know that it's still happening. To people accused of crimes. Yeah. And it's partly due to the fact that the police is absent. Right.
So especially in townships, someone is a rapist and the police doesn't show up, doesn't do anything. And then the local community just deals with him. That type of thing happens in a very brutal way. Yes, yes. Yeah, it does happen in a brutal way.
Yeah, I mentioned the necklace murders before. So we have that. And it's the same with the xenophobic violence. It's very unfortunate. And if we had a well-functioning police service, Maybe that would have helped, but we don't. So in South Africa, we can check the numbers.
I'm pretty sure the private security sphere in South Africa is almost as big as private security in America, but America is much larger. Private security in South Africa is more than double the police and the army combined. If you add the police and the army up together and you multiply it by two, Private security is the amount of private security officers in South Africa or security guards.
Yes, we do have the right to self-defense. We can own firearms, although it's not as easy as in America.
But you can do that. You can get arms, especially through a private security company. There's some room to make sure that you can protect yourself. And does it work? Yes, yes.
In terms of the farm murders, we've seen that statistically, that in communities where areas or communities where people are well organized, where they have radios, where they drive patrols, where they are trained, there's a decrease in farm murders. You can clearly see that. Actually, in the last few years, the farm murder numbers have come down a bit. And it's not because...
because the incitement has gotten better. It's not because the police is more efficient. It's because local communities have become much more involved with their own safety. And so that's certainly one of the most important building blocks of the solution.
No, no, people won't comply. No, I mean, that's partly why I told this story at the beginning, is the Afrikaner people and the farmers are very stubborn. In Afrikaans, we say hard-headed. Well, you have to be stubborn to be a farmer in the first place. Yes, and especially a farmer in South Africa.
I mean, it's easier. Yes, exactly. So it's a common trope among farmers to say that I would rather die on my farm than to hand it over to the government. And so I think if they really try to act on it, which they haven't tried. There are land invasions in South Africa, but it's not so much the government, it's mobs and gangs and so forth invading people's land.
But if they really try to act on these attempts at expropriation, there's going to be a massive backlash. And there's no doubt. So what they would say is, this is actually what the government says, that we need to do what happened in Zimbabwe, but without violence. But that's how they would argue it.
Yeah, you can find it online. And so the argument is, but we're going to do it a bit better. We're going to do it without violence. But what that means is we're going to do what happened in Zimbabwe and you are not going to resist. That's what it means. But obviously people will resist when they try to do that. There's no doubt about it. But I do think the government is very incompetent.
You know, they have these very radical ideas. I don't know if they have the competency to actually go through.
So there are some business organizations in South Africa who now use the term maximum appropriate noncompliance. That's what they encourage private companies to do. So it's a form of civil disobedience. It's with all these BEE, these black empowerment laws, to just say,
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