Pretoria - The African National Congress (ANC) government has committed itself to making South Africans feel safe and secure.
Delivering his annual January 8 statement, which traditionally is the start of the political year, ANC President Jacob Zuma commended the police service for the significant decline in the murder rate and other serious crimes.
He said this indicated the successes of the increased focus on the fight against crime.
Zuma said progress had been made in increasing the capacity of the police through recruitment, rigorous training, improving the detective services, forensics, prosecution, judicial services and crime intelligence.
"In the interest of national security, we must speed up the regulation of the private security industry, which often possesses and has access to more dangerous weaponry than necessary," he said.
In terms of corruption, he said the ANC's National Executive Committee has started the process of developing guidelines for the ANC Integrity Committee.
The ANC government has a number of structures whose task is to prevent, fight and deal with corruption, including a Cabinet Inter-Ministerial Committee, the Special Investigating Unit and an Anti-Corruption Task Team led by the Hawks.
Various investigations, he said, were currently underway in the public service, to help ensure clean governance.
Turning to rural development and land reform, the Zuma said the restoration of land to people had always been an integral part of the struggle for freedom.
"Land reform will now be based on the de-racialisation of the rural economy," he said, adding that this will enable shared and sustained growth, as well as, democratic and equitable land allocation and use across gender, race and class.
Zuma said a strict production discipline for guaranteed national food security was also needed.
In order to have more land available for land reform and restitution, government was looking at three forms of land holding.
"These are that state land that can only be held through leasehold; freehold with limited extent on private land and foreigners will be allowed to lease land but ownership will revert to South Africans."
The ANC government will enact legislation that will give greater protection to farm workers and farm dwellers. It will also improve the capacity to monitor and enforce compliance with this legislation.
