MICHAEL SCHMIDT: Police use apartheid brutality still, 30 years after democracy began

More than 20 years ago, a horrific scene played out at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) — the re-enactment by bulky former apartheid cop Jeffrey Benzien of how he used to sit on the backs of suspects, suffocating them with a wet bag tied over their heads. 

Now the New York Times has released a report by its Johannesburg-based correspondent, John Eligon, based on research over a decade, that this most notorious of torture techniques, known locally as “tubing”, is still widely practised by the police. 

In fact, tubing is such a common experience to those unfortunate enough to fall foul of the long arm of the “law” that in 2012-2023, Eligon said, “an average of three people per week filed complaints that the police had tubed them during interrogations”.

And that’s only counting those who reported suffocation as a form of torture. It excludes the equally widespread use by the police of psychological torture, according to veteran violence monitor Mary de Haas, an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s school of law. 

The news could scarcely have come at a worse time for the police after the recent accusations by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, backed up by claims that are now being interrogated by the public protector and a commission of inquiry appointed by the president, that police minister Senzo Mchunu is entangled in organised crime cartels and so had undermined police investigations.

There have been widespread popular demonstrations in KwaZulu-Natal in support of Mkhwanazi’s stance, many motivated precisely because on his watch police had allegedly been shooting and killing suspected “gangsters” without due process — and even though the disbanded Political Killings Task Team he defended had itself been involved in tubing innocent people, De Haas says. 

Poet and author Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull recounts the spectacle of Benzien demonstrating the horror of tubing: “The sight of this bluntly built white man sitting on the back of his black victim, who lies facedown on the floor, and pulling a blue bag over his head, will remain one of the most loaded and disturbing images of the truth commission.” 

Eligon illustrates his article with one of those photographs, with detective Benzien in his immaculate grey pinstripe three-piece suit squatting like an ogre on the back of a prone black volunteer who has his hands behind his back as if handcuffed.

Shockingly, this old apartheid brutality still plays out all the time in police stations countrywide, more than three decades after the coming of democracy. The NY Times recruited local journalism nonprofit Viewfinder in identifying “about 1,700 tubing complaints lodged over 11 years with the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, a government watchdog. 

“In only one case did the police dismiss an officer. (He was later reinstated.) In six instances, officers were convicted in court, according to the data.” Eligon cites the case of Innocent Sebedelia, accused of stealing a television, who died in custody having been tubed with a pepper-spray-filled plastic bag over his head: two officers responsible were sentenced to 18 years for torture and murder. 

“But officers are rarely held accountable,” Eligon says, writing with Viewfinder’s Daneel Knoetze. That is because “there’s a lot of inbuilt systemic disincentives to hold cops accountable”, Institute for Security Studies’ justice and violence-prevention programme head, Gareth Newham, says. 

He cites statistics: in the decade 2011-2021 about 50,000 cases were lodged against the police for brutality, but 90% of those cases were shut down because “police simply closed ranks”. Of the remainder, a tiny proportion was referred for disciplinary hearings, of which half were withdrawn with most of the rest resulting in mere written or verbal warnings. 

Only 1% were referred to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for prosecution. But in 60% of those cases the NPA refused to prosecute: prosecutors rely on the police themselves for successful convictions, while police forensics is in a shambles. Many prosecutors are also simply corrupt and easily bought off, De Haas says. 

Of the handful of police brutality cases that run the gauntlet and actually make it through to court, Newham says, “If you’re a police officer facing a charge, you have about half the chance of being convicted compared with an ordinary citizen. The consequence is a huge dive in social trust: in 2021, 27% of people surveyed said they have some trust in police, but 73% said they had little or no trust.” 

In a vicious spiral, police on the beat — notably in specialist units such as the former Political Killings Task Team — increasingly turn to brutality and torture to shore up their questionable authority. 

De Haas argues that 2009 was the “watershed year” in the decline of policing in SA, when Jacob Zuma took over the presidency and disbanded the Scorpions, which she says was a unit that merely needed “cleaning-up” but was axed because it was investigating corrupt ANC leaders. 

“Our criminal justice system has all but broken down,” she says. “It’s been an organised crime syndicate since the 1980s when the apartheid police were distributing drugs here and on the Cape Flats.” 

Newham dates the decline to the dramatic expansion and militarisation of the police. The ballooning of numbers from 132,000 in 2002 to just less than 200,000 in 2012, with the halving of training to a year recreated the notoriously poorly-trained kitskonstabels (instant constables) of late apartheid, while the adoption of military ranks from 2009 was supposed to impose military discipline, yet without proper training to back it up actually reinforced brutality and machismo in the service. 

With the commissioners and higher ranks subject to the vagaries of political appointment, worsened by the sorts of factionalism in the ANC we are now seeing with the Mkhwanazi-Mchunu debacle; with professional career officers desk-bound and overburdened with work yet stripped of many specialist services; and with thuggish kitskonstabels susceptible to gross criminality roaming the streets, systemic dysfunction rules. 

• Schmidt is an award-winning investigative journalist and nonfiction author who has worked in 49 countries on six continents.