COLUMN: Dear Mr President, Heavyweight boxing champion, Mike Tyson, famously said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth".

Well, the July 12 apocalypse has brutally ripped apart the threadbare safety net that had been tenuously holding the country's security together. 

How on earth did we get to this point where the army, taxi associations, businesses and neighbourhood watches have to leap into the breach left wide open by the police?

And what of the abysmal failure of police intelligence to foresee the brewing storm around Jacob Zuma's incarceration which even a KwaMashu granny could have predicted?

Sir, can't you see? SA is hamstrung by a ham-handed police minister with 199 impotent police generals in tow.

And please don't use Marikana as an excuse. A well-trained security force knows full well there are 50 shades of blue when it comes to quelling unrest and protecting the country's citizenry with professional efficiency.

I'm sorry but your 30 minute long stage-managed speech of 16 July does nothing to assuage our worst fears that SA's raw underbelly is exposed and dangerously vulnerable. There is however one thing you can do immediately.

The latest mayhem and turmoil has outed the Minister of Police General Bheki Cele as our weakest link and the most sinister snake in the grass. Did you really think he was chatting to Gedleyihlekisa about soccer over tea at Nkandla? 

And if you are agued by a paucity of competence within your party, then parachute in expertise from outside. As you did with Patricia de Lille.

Sir, if you don't have the guts to get rid of Cele, then please allow your gatvol fellow South Africans to give you 59 million reasons to do so. Otherwise post him off as ambassador to Afghanistan.

And for goodness' sake, do it urgently - before the next Concourt pronouncement on Zuma. Our fragile nation might not survive the next wave of thuggery and anarchy.