If President Cyril Ramaphosa were not asleep at the wheel he would by now have announced the establishment of a national police board — recommended by the National Planning Commission (NPC), which he himself chaired — to tackle the bloated, corrupt, factionalised top police brass once and for all.
He would remove embattled police minister Senzo Mchunu pending an independent parliamentary probe into his conduct, and replace him with a trustworthy leader from among the ANC’s government of national unity partners — either Rise Mzansi’s Songezo Zibi or the IFP’s Velenkosini Hlabisa.
The ANC is too compromised in the public eye to hold the position after KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi alleged a connection between Mchunu and organised crime syndicates. News24 also reported this week that Mchunu’s predecessor, Bheki Cele, stayed in a luxury suite owned by the same crime boss.
Yet Ramaphosa is once again “shocked” into silence and inaction. It is becoming painfully clear that he is no chess player, simply a coward.
The dire crime situation in the country may appear daunting and impossible to turn around, but this is far from the truth. Analysts and academics have been studying and writing on this for decades, from the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) to the Human Sciences Research Council and even Ramaphosa’s NPC.
There is no political will to fix the police because, as political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi put it to 702 on Thursday “our political class is a criminal class that is criminalising our state”.
The president returned to SA on Tuesday after the Brics summit in Brazil and remained silent on the bombshell revelation by Mkhwanazi linking Mchunu and senior colleague Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya to alleged organised crime boss Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala and ANC tenderpreneur and influence peddler Brown Mogotsi.
While artful, Mogotsi is not unique — characters like him who form part of ANC structures are well connected to a host of senior leaders and have deep influence over its structures through their “generosity”. They are the known contact point between criminal cartels and senior politicians, including ministers and board members of state-owned companies.
Police commissioner Fannie Masemola has confirmed that Ramaphosa had not even reached out to him for a meeting more than 24 hours after returning to the country and 56 hours after Mkwhanazi’s revelations. Ramaphosa’s office says he will address the nation on the matter on Sunday evening at 7pm.
The crisis in the SAPS is not insurmountable, it is actually one of the many easy fixes the ANC simply lacks the appetite to tackle. Successive police commissioners and ministers have been embroiled in corruption scandals, which does help explain the lack of political will to fix the country’s crime busting architecture, including the police, crime intelligence and state security.
In the aftermath of the July 2021 unrest, SA’s first post-democratic police commissioner, George Fivaz, told the Financial Mail that a “corrupt society has produced a corrupt police force”.
Police union Popcru, affiliated to ANC ally Cosatu, has repeatedly raised the alarm on dodgy individuals buying their way into the police force, for employment or more sinister purposes.
There are some 200 generals at the top of the police force, which many analysts describe as “nonsensical”. The ISS’s Gareth Newham says the main problem with the police is that politicians and many of these dozens of “generals” view the police as an employment agency. The end result is that many who end up there are incompetent, embroiled in corruption and highly factional.
This is why the idea of a national police board remains relevant — it should include expertise from across the criminal justice system, to screen every police officer currently in its headquarters within three months and then across the provinces, down to station level within six months.
It should then set about restructuring the police and dispatching talented, competent officials to the stations and regions where they are most needed, kick out the dead wood and compromised individuals and develop a code of ethics to raise the standard of policing, based on the best international experience.
At this point, only a complete overhaul of the SAPS will do — if only Ramaphosa had the stomach for it.
• Marrian is Business Day editor at large.
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