Many would have wondered where police minister Bheki Cele was coming from when, during a press conference, he mentioned that the police were less equipped than the zama zamas – groups of loosely connected illegal mining bandits.

Most would not have read much into Cele’s claims, which were not the first he had made in recent weeks. In another media briefing the minister revealed the shockingly inadequate numbers of boots on the ground in the police force, with about 20,000 fewer policemen and women  in the SA Police Service today than in 2010.

The message started to take even more shape over the past few days when talk began making the rounds that there were preparations to deploy soldiers to help the police fight crime, which has anecdotely been getting seriously out of hand recently. The latest release of police quarterly crime statistics made the picture even grimmer, and no doubt added weight to the yearn to have soldiers come in to help fight the scourge, which comes in variants such as rape, murder, women and child abuse, assault with intention to cause grievous bodily harm and robberies.

Yes, it is a deliberate mention of the kinds of crimes soldiers are envisaged to help police win the war on crime. It is difficult to imagine how troops trained in the art of war, killing machines, are going to help the police to fight the crime stalking ordinary people every step of their everyday lives.

We don't see the army asa solution in any way. We have been down that path before and a walk down memory lane doesn't paint a pretty picture at all.

A few weeks ago an anniversary of a mass deployment of troops into residential areas went largely unnoticed. A reader wrote to Sowetan and reminded the nation that it was 28 years since apartheid president PW Botha declared the state of emergency that unleashed the army into townships, bringing with them untold  mayhem and terror that South Africans yearning for a knee-jerk deployment of soliers "to help the police" would do well to recall.

An even fresher memory to rejig is the recent terror, albeit not large scale, the deployment of soldiers brought to residential areas during the opening days of the Covid-19  lockdown. Need we say more?

The answer lies, Mr Minister, in proper policing and the rule of law. In vogue as the talk against zama zamas might be today, it is a problem that incompetent policing allowed to grow. Rounding up the foot soldiers of the illicit mining industry will not help the cause much either. There are many sitting pretty atop the zama zama food chain and unless they are brought down, the war will not be won.

It will take proper policing, including crime intelligence, to fight such crimes; army boots on the ground aren’t the answer.