OF THE many operations launched, to make this country safe for visitor and host alike, two seem to have stormed into public life with a bang.

One is operation Noma Kanjani by the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department. The other is operation Duty Calls by the South African Police Service.

Lay observation suggests Noma Kanjani is aimed at producing new drivers that make road usage a collective responsibility for the safety of every being that walks and drives on them.

The JMPD is not unmindful of its share of nasty apples with a penchant to turn fresh into sour by extorting money as though bribery is part of their conditions of employment.

The SAPS's operation Duty Calls seems geared at producing law-abiding citizens from the living days of the rest of us.

The same respect should be accorded to our dearly departed. Society is cursed with the macabre type that would stop at nothing to invade graves, desecrate tombstones, exhume coffins and dispose of corpses because, to them, dying is a business to be pursued to heartless and shameless profit margins.

The right to have our lives back, to walk the streets - to and from work - and find our homes safe to return to, without a chance of of dying inside our very homes and cars at the nonchalant will and whim of hijackers is a promise that General Bheki Cele seems to be making.

Operation Duty Calls is a warning signal to those who live by killing; earn their living without working; own by stealing, masquerade as businessmen to mask criminal acts; fraudulently acquire passing school marks without sitting for examinations; reduce children and women into sellable goods and objects to be trafficked on demand and those who feather their criminals nests through the blood of the innocent.

In times like these, wishes should speak less in favour of General Cele's demonstrable commitment to save our country from being a gangster's paradise. Duty Calls should not just be a year-end festive act.

That said, we need another overarching nationwide operation dedicated at making "new beings", to emerge of South Africa's people, to bestow upon this country that greatest gift that Steve Biko had dreamt of - a human face. Call it operation Human Resurrection.

The operation should reawaken dead and abandoned senses in us all and be run outside narrow party political borders, inter-ministerial contestation or mindless bias of self-interested groups.

Wisdom permitting, operation Human Resurrection should be located within the office of the president with execution delegated to the National Planning Commission to punch some life into Trevor Manuel's job description.

Unavoidably, the composition of the NPC will need to be reviewed from being a hopeless accommodation of jostling and desperate interests to becoming the nation's cohesive credible brain trust for navigation of true humanity.

More than a monitoring and evaluation station and administration of performance contracts between the president and ministers, Collins Chabane's office must be refashioned to ignite the nation's imagination to seek, find and reach for the higher selves that wait to be reborn from individual members of this blessed nation.

If Noma Kanjani promises safe road usage, Duty Calls law-abiding citizenry, Human Resurrection should see the rebirth of true and common humanity.