The exposure of alleged ANC spy Sifiso Nkabinde highlights the nature of the tension between George Fivaz and Sydney Mufamadi, write Mail & Guardian Reporters
THE public spat between Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi and national Police Commissioner George Fivaz is the culmination of old tensions around police inability to deliver in the face of severe public and political pressure to staunch the rampant crime wave.
And while Safety and Security Secretary Azhar Cachalia, Mufamadi and President Nelson Mandela’s office labelled Fivaz’s charge of political interference a “red herring”, officers in the Fivaz camp claim there has indeed been tension around perceptions that Mufamadi was trying to hijack police intelligence functions for party-political purposes.
Cachalia said last week’s restructuring announcement by Fivaz – the ostensible cause of the disagreement – was not the issue. “The root here is a problem around the view we have of [police] management’s inability to deliver. We maintain there is a serious skills shortage … with or without the present commissioner.” This came against a background of public and political pressures to deal more effectively with crime.
He said there had been an “accumulation of disagreements” with police management before, including the public spat last year when he himself had labelled the plan to arrest 10 000 most-wanted criminals as a “gimmick”.
There had also been a serious disagreement between Mufamadi and Fivaz over Mufamadi’s perception that police management had dragged its heels in the development of a police human resources plan.
An officer close to Fivaz this week said tensions between Fivaz and Mufamadi went back as far as early last year, when there had been “consistent pressure” from the minister on the police to deliver a list of police agents and informers’ names to him, to be handed to the National Intelligence Agency. Fivaz refused.
The officer said Mufamadi’s attempts to “grab” the police intelligence capacity for party-political purposes was central to the row. “This is what Fivaz means by political interference.”
He said symptomatic of this – and one of the latest incidents that angered Fivaz – was the way KwaZulu-Natal warlord Sifiso Nkabinde had been exposed as an alleged police spy within the African National Congress.
Leonard Radu, the assistant police commissioner who died in a car accident a few weeks ago, had been instrumental in the exposure of Nkabinde. A former senior ANC intelligence operative, Radu headed the police Internal Security component – successor to the old security branch – at the time of his death.
The officer claimed Mufamadi had instructed Radu to unearth police files on Nkabinde, and that these had been handed to the ANC – a blurring of his police function and his party-political background. The M&G has established independently that Radu had investigated Nkabinde at the time of his death.
Senior police officials this week also speculated that among the long-standing tensions between Fivaz and Mufamadi was the position of Andr Pruis, divisional head of the police National Standards and Management Services.
Pruis, who has a security police background, has led a number of piecemeal attempts to restructure police management, and plans like the arrest of the 10 000 most-wanted criminals, which was widely regarded as a failure.
Said a senior police management member: “There is a feeling in the organisation that we try to address crime problems by creating structures, rather than [fighting crime]. There is too much restructuring, too many grand plans … That is basically the frustration I’m picking up among members.”
Mufamadi hinted on Monday at similar unhappiness from his side: “I believed then [when Fivaz made his restructuring announcement], and I still do, that the premature restructuring of the service perpetuates the culture of `fire brigade’ management which has characterised the management approach to dealing with problems thus far.”
Cachalia denied Pruis’s position was related to the immediate cause of the tension. But a plan by Fivaz to appoint Pruis to head one of the two new divisions announced in his restructuring may not have gone down well with Mufamadi, who has the right to veto top appointments.
When Fivaz announced the restructuring last week, he said Louis Eloff would be appointed divisional commissioner in charge of the newly named and reshaped National Crime Prevention and Response Service, while Manie Schoeman would be divisional commissioner in charge of the new beefed-up National Detective Service.
But Fivaz added: “I must also emphasise that these appointments do not exclude future redeployment of top-echelon management members, including the above- mentioned.”
Senior police officers said Fivaz had intended to replace Eloff with Pruis – who had not applied for either of the two positions in the first place – in a matter of weeks. The officer close to Fivaz confirmed the intended reshuffle, but said it was a strategy to “get Pruis out of the engine room” of change management.
Eloff would get Pruis’s current position in the reshuffle. He said there had been tensions around Pruis “both internally and with the minister”.