Take the world’s highest homicide rate. Add a shocking salary structure and go-slow force. Allow to simmer and you’ve got a blueprint for mayhem, reports Stefaans
Simmering police discontent had to boil over, adding steam to the pressure cooker of a society reeling from the world’s worst crime wave. Even the hurried appointment this week of an ad hoc committee to resolve police pay grievances was not enough to stop a national go-slow from gaining ground.
This week the action by South African Police Service members, which started a week ago in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, spread to all but two regions, the Northern Transvaal and the Eastern Transvaal. The South African Police Union (Sapu) said protests were in the pipeline for those regions too and estimated that 35 000 policemen and women — almost a third of the service — had joined countrywide.
While there has been remarkable unanimity that police have reason to be dissatisfied — everyone, from union representatives to President Nelson Mandela, has agreed on that — efforts at mediation and the appointment on Tuesday night of a technical committee to find solutions have failed to bear immediate fruit.
Said Gerhardt van der Merwe, national organiser of Sapu: “We have the committee that will look at remuneration and we are participating in it, but until that process has been completed we are not going to stop (the go-slow).”
Van der Merwe, whose union disowns responsibility for initiating the “spontaneous” police action but now backs it, said it could take three weeks for the committee to find solutions.
The police action coincides with the release of World Health Organisation figures which again brand South Africa the “murder capital of the world”, with 53,5 homicides for every 100 000 people each year — more than twice the 22,6 per 100 000 of the next ranking country, the Carribean island of St Lucia.
Said Professor Mohamed Seedat, head of the Health Psychology Unit at the University of South Africa: “Undoubtedly, South Africa is the most violent country in the world outside a war context.”
Prominent in the go-slow have been detective branches and other police components in the frontline of the struggle against violent crime. In many areas detectives — who, Sapu says, in cities work up to 16 hours a day without overtime pay — are refusing to respond to anything but the most serious cases.
While socio-economic factors cannot be discounted as the primary cause of crime, the diminished capacity of a police service crippled by strike action must have come as a serious blow to a government which has vowed to reduce crime and violence.
Mandela himself tried to reassure police last weekend already, when he said he was “concerned” about remuneration and working conditions, and that he was “not angry” with police.
After the weekend the government embarked on high-level discussions with the unions and police management, involving the ministries of Safety and Security, Finance and Public Service and Administration, culminating on Tuesday night in the establishment of the technical committee, which comprises police managment, Sapu, the Public Servants’ Association (PSA) and the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru). The fact that an ad hoc committee had to be established to deal with the police pay issue highlights the fact that, as far as statutory labour rights are concerned, the police service has been the stepchild among branches of the public sector.
Sapu said current legislation bars police collective bargaining at the Public Service Commission negotiating
Lawyer Azhar Cachalia, who is helping to draft a new Police Bill for Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi, said it was “common cause that there is an unsatisfactory situation now”, but he said a labour rights section in the Police Bill, which is expected to be ready in October, would fill the gap.
Van der Merwe pointed to a grim legacy left by the absence of bargaining rights: a constable taking home as little as R800 a month, or a warrant officer with 20 years’ service clearing R1 500 to R1 800. “Suppose that warrant officer is a branch commander at a regional branch; imagine the responsibility he bears,” he said.
Even though the technical committee holds out the promise of some relief, it will be unable to secure better basic salaries for police. The Budget this year allowed R2,5-billion for the relatively minor improvement of salaries and service benefits in the whole of the public service. The PSA spoke out strongly against the possibility of police receiving a disproportionate share.
Warnings by the PSA that there was also dissatisfaction in other public sector branches and that government “would be well advised to take a holistic approach rather than make exceptions (which) could set a spark to the tinder-bow” seem to have been heeded.
A spokesman for national police commissioner George Fivaz said police salary increments would be dealt with in the context of public service increases in general, and that the committee would look merely at remuneration for overtime and better allowances.
Van der Merwe said the committee would try to see if parts of the police budget could be reallocated for that purpose and that reconstruction and development plan allocations could also be investigated. “We are not keen to take RDP money, but apparently in that budget provision has been made for certain projects. After all, no projects of the government can be implemented wihout a stable society.”