South Africa’s Police Minister Firoz Cachalia has said that the security forces are not yet able to defeat deadly criminal gangs, in a stark admission that underscores the scale of the country’s crime crisis.
Gang violence, alongside robberies, accounts for many murders in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest homicide rates.
Cachalia said gang violence had become increasingly complex, especially in the Eastern Cape and Western Cape provinces, requiring new strategies beyond traditional policing.
“I do not believe that we are currently in a position to defeat these gangs,” the minister told journalists on Wednesday.
South Africa, the continent’s most industrialised nation, has long struggled with entrenched organised crime.
Many people in South Africa own licensed firearms for personal protection, but there are many more illegal guns in circulation.
Police data shows that an average of 63 people were killed each day between April and September last year.
Speaking after his visit to crime-infested Nelson Mandela Bay in Eastern Cape, Cachalia said criminal gangs were on a “killing spree” in the two provinces.
“We had a discussion about the problem of organised crime in the Eastern Cape, including extortion rackets, gang violence and related issues,” said the minister.
“I indicated that this is a grave problem throughout the country, that these cartels wield significant wealth and power, and that this is deeply concerning,” he added.
Despite the creation of an anti-gang unit in 2019, Cachalia said gangsters seemed to be winning the war.
“Establishing gang units from time to time is an ad hoc response to a growing problem. I really don’t think that we should be approaching this matter in a point-scoring way.”
He said South African police were doing their best to fight the violence “but the problem is a growing one. That is my view”.
His visit comes months after Nelson Mandela Bay was hit by a wave of killings.
A deadly spike in violence hit the area in the latter half of last year, leaving 118 people dead between August and December, a local prevention group said.
The violence has continued into the new year, with around 40 people killed across the region in January, local media reported.
There are about three million legally held firearms in South Africa, but there are at least the same number of unlicensed weapons in circulation in the country, which has a population of 63 million, according to statistics cited by Gideon Joubert from the South African Gunowners’ Association.
Sinners stars Miles Caton (left) and Michael B Jordan
Vampire horror film Sinners has broken the record for the most Oscar nominations received by a single film, after being nominated for 16 of Hollywood’s most coveted honours.
The film beat the previous record of 14 nominations, and emerged ahead of its nearest rival this year, Leonardo DiCaprio’s thriller One Battle After Another, which is up for 13 awards.
Sinners’ contenders include its star Michael B Jordan and his British co-stars Wunmi Mosaku and Delroy Lindo.
Other big names up for trophies include Timothée Chalamet, who is hoping for third time lucky after two previous nominations, and Irish actress Jessie Buckley, who is the frontrunner to win best actress for Hamnet.
Universal
Jessie Buckley is frontrunner to win best actress for Hamnet
However, there was no space for her co-star Paul Mescal, who starred opposite Buckley as William Shakespeare in Hamnet; while Wicked: For Good and its stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande missed out completely.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Hollywood on 15 March.
The leading films:
Sinners – 16
One Battle After Another – 13
Marty Supreme – 9
Frankenstein – 9
Sentimental Value – 9
Hamnet – 8
Sinners ‘more than just a horror’
Sinners has exceeded expectations and bucked the trend that normally means horror films don’t perform well at award ceremonies.
It beat the previous record total of 14 nominations, achieved by All About Eve in 1951, Titanic in 1998 and La La Land in 2018.
Michael B Jordan is nominated for best actor for playing twin brothers who return home to Mississippi in the 1930s to set up a juke joint, which is set upon by blood-sucking vampires.
Other Sinners cast members to be nominated include British-Nigerian actress Wunmi Mosaku and co-star Delroy Lindo, who grew up in London, and the pair are carrying Britain’s hopes for acting awards this year.
Ryan Coogler is nominated for directing, writing and producing Sinners, with the film also shortlisted for the Oscars’ top prize, best picture.
Warner Bros
Wunmi Mosaku and Michael B Jordan are both nominated for their performances in Sinners
BBC Radio 1 film critic Ali Plumb said: “The last time anything to do with a horror won best picture was The Silence of the Lambs in the early 1990s. That is a long time ago.”
He said it was good to see Sinners get “this broad a series of accolades and thumbs up from across the whole industry”.
It is “more than just a horror”, he added. “Although obviously vampires are obviously involved, there’s so much more to it.”
BBC culture editor Katie Razzall said: “It is to my mind the perfect blend of revenge thriller and sexy, decadent, musical journey through America’s race issues, good against evil, the power of music – and redemption.
“Who knew that combining vampires, KKK racists, ex-gangster twins (both played by Michael B Jordan), Mississippi delta folklore and blues history would pay off so spectacularly?”
Losing the battle but winning the war?
Warner Bros
Leonardo DiCaprio is nominated for best actor for his role in One Battle After Another
While Sinners deals with the spectre of racism in the American South, One Battle After Another gives a take on the current messy political climate in the US.
Leonardo DiCaprio is nominated for best actor for playing a revolutionary battling an authoritarian US regime, whose past comes back to haunt him.
The film has also scooped nominations for supporting cast members Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor, as well as director Paul Thomas Anderson.
It has been the presumed favourite to win best picture throughout award season so far, and it could still pip Sinners to the top trophy in March.
The frontrunner in the nominations doesn’t always turn out to be the big winner on the night. In the past 21 years, the movie with the most nominations has gone on to win best picture just six times.
Either way, the nominations are good news for Warner Bros, which made both Sinners and One Battle After Another, as it is in the process of being sold, possibly to Netflix.
Chalamet eyes first Oscar
A24
Marty Supreme has earned Timothee Chalamet the third Oscar nomination of his career, but he’s yet to win
DiCaprio and Jordan will face stiff competition from Timothee Chalamet, who is hotly tipped to win his first Oscar for his role in table tennis caper Marty Supreme.
At 30, he has become the youngest man to receive three acting nominations since Marlon Brando.
This year’s best actor category is completed by Ethan Hawke, who has his fifth Oscar nomination for Blue Moon, and Brazilian actor Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent).
At 37, Emma Stone has become the youngest woman to accumulate seven Oscar nominations after being recognised for Bugonia.
She is listed for best actress alongside Kate Hudson (Song Sung Blue), Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) and Norway’s Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value) – but Buckley is regarded as the clear favourite in that race.
Moura and Reinsve are among a record four acting nominations for non-English language performances – the others being Sweden’s Stellan Skarsgård and Norwegian actress Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who are both in supporting categories for Sentimental Value.
KPop characters v rock stars
Fan favourite KPop Demon Hunters has been recognised in the Oscar nominations, too. The animated Netflix hit is in pole position to win best animated feature and best song, for mega-hit Golden.
Co-writer of the track, Mark Sonnenblick, told BBC Newsbeat’s Naomi de Souza that Thursday’s Academy recognition had been the “icing on the cake”.
“The only reason that this morning [in Los Angeles] happened, regardless of the quality of the song or the movie or any of that, is just because fans responded to it and told other people to watch it and repost it and made fan videos,” he said.
There’s no room, though, for the Wicked sequel.
This time last year, the first film received 10 nominations, and the follow-up had been widely expected to join Golden in the best song race (for The Girl in the Bubble) and be nominated for prizes like best costume and make-up. But it missed out.
Elsewhere in the music categories, Nick Cave is nominated for best song for the title song from Train Dreams, and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is nominated for best original score for One Battle After Another.
Other British nominees include fellow composer Nicholas Pike, who is up for best original song for Viva Verdi!; while Northern Irish author Maggie O’Farrell is nominated for a screenplay award for adapting her novel Hamnet alongside director Chloe Zhao.
Zhao has become only the second woman to be nominated for multiple best director Oscars, after Jane Campion. Zhao won that award for Nomadland in 2021.
Meanwhile, the best documentary feature category includes Mr Nobody Against Putin, a BBC Storyville co-production.
France says it has seized an oil tanker in the Mediterranean suspected of being part of Russia’s sanction-busting “shadow fleet”.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the tanker, named the Grinch, was “subject to international sanctions and suspected of flying a false flag”.
The French navy, with the assistance of allies including the UK, boarded the vessel on Thursday morning between Spain and Morocco. French maritime authorities said that a search of the vessel had “confirmed the doubts as to the regularity of the flag”.
Russia’s embassy in Paris said it had not been informed of the seizure.
Moscow’s so-called shadow fleet is a clandestine network of tankers used to evade Western sanctions on Russian oil exports by shipping the oil on aged tankers with obscure ownership or insurance.
The Grinch was travelling from the Arctic port of Murmansk in northern Russia when it was intercepted, French authorities said. The vessel had been flying a Comoros flag, according to ship tracking websites marinetraffic and vesselfinder.
Announcing the seizure on X, Macron said: “We are determined to uphold international law and to ensure the effective enforcement of sanctions.
“The activities of the “shadow fleet” contribute to financing the war of aggression against Ukraine,” he said, adding that the vessel had been “diverted”.
Defence Secretary John Healy said the UK navy had provided “tracking and monitoring” support, with HMS Dagger monitoring the tanker through the Straits of Gibraltar.
He added: “Alongside our allies, we are stepping up our response to shadow vessels to choke off the funds that fuel Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.”
The UK has imposed sanctions on 544 Russian shadow fleet vessels.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed the action, saying it was “exactly the kind of resolve needed to ensure that Russian oil no longer finances Russia’s war”.
“Vessels must be apprehended. And wouldn’t it be fair to confiscate and sell the oil carried by these tankers?” he said on X.
Speaking at Davos earlier, Zelensky exhorted Europe to do more to ensure its own security, saying: “Europe loves to discuss the future but avoids taking action”.
Many Western countries imposed sanctions on Russian energy following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
