Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi plans to pull the plug on taxpayers paying for lawyers to defend policemen charged with involvement in “third force” activities.
Officials in his secretariat said this week they were preparing to end state support for third force killers — a practice which has sucked up millions of rands of taxpayers’ money paid out of the police budget. The trial of former Vlakplaas killer Eugene de Kock alone cost the taxpayer R5,8-million, while the “Motherwell” trial cost R2,5-million.
The Legal Aid Board’s total pay-out to defend civilian criminals last year was R93-million. A secretariat official said the onus would be on George Fivaz, the national commissioner of police, to investigate whether police officers facing prosecution had been involved in third force activities. Until now the police have paid out if their officer was held to have acted in the course of his duties.
According to the present rules, a member will not be paid out if he acted recklessly or wilfully or under the influence of drugs or alcohol — a set of qualifications which De Kock, for example, managed to slip through. Officials said the new policy was intended to “inculcate a new style of litigation which will involve full investigation to determine which cases have merit”.
The secretariat was also anxious to change the choice of lawyers usually selected to handle police matters. In many instances the same lawyers who represented the police under the old government have been selected by bureaucrats handling police litigation.
Mufamadi has at least twice ordered police to settle matters that were not worth fighting. In one instance, the police were ordered to withdraw an appeal against a R188 000 damages award to a former Umkhonto weSizwe operative who was brutally tortured for several weeks.
The safety and security secretary, Azhar Cachalia, spoke at the time of the need to stop “knee-jerk denials of human rights abuses”. The army has apparently yet to embrace a third force legal policy — despite the fact that taxpayers paid out R7,25 million last year for the KwaMakutha case in which the former defence minister, Magnus Malan, was acquitted of running a death squad.
A South African National Defence Force spokesman said state cover was provided “on the basis that the person was actually in service and was acting within the course and scope of the individual’s employment as an officer of the state”. The official said it was up to the state attorney to decide whether “a member has forfeited his cover”. He said it was too early to say how much the army had spent on legal fees in the last financial year.
In the 1995/6 financial year it had paid out R2,7- million. The defence force did not budget for legal defence costs and so was unable to give a projection for the coming year. Meanwhile, it has emerged that the Legal Aid Board is funding some of the individual members of the Inkatha Freedom Party due to appear before a commission of inquiry into the 1994 Shell House massacre which starts next week.
A Legal Aid Board senior official, Peter Brits, said that although the individuals were being funded, the board as a rule did not fund political parties and so was not backing the IFP itself. The IFP has, however, previously applied for legal aid. It asked for state funding during the commission of inquiry into mine violence at several Goldfields mines last year, but was turned down.
The IFP and its individuals involved in the Shell House inquiry before Judge Robert Nugent will be represented by six legal teams. The African National Congress’s members will be represented by one team, comprising one attorney and four advocates.