their leaders
Beata Lipman
It’s a funny old world.
There we are, interviewing Jessie Duarte, Minister of Safety and Security for Gauteng, on rampant police corruption. She sounds off strongly. Then we interview a guy called Wilfrid Scharf from Cape Town for SABC television and he tells us politicians must do more than talk. After all, if you can’t trust the cops, how can you feel safe; how can you feel a part of building the new South Africa when you sit trembling at home?
I open Business Day, and there Gauteng chief whip Richard Ndakane announces that Jessie’s fellow Safety and Security committee member Oupa Monareng (recently convicted of offering a bribe to a police) is a good man. “Monareng worked hard and the ANC is happy with him.”
That means he is not going to lose his job as a provincial legislator – only on the committee.
Ndakane refers to the Constitution – every member has to “respect and uphold the Constitution and all other laws of the country”.
In practice, that means they can stay where they are, as long as the sentence is only a suspended one. I phone Jessie on her cell phone, but she’s in London and pleads ignorance.
Let’s try another tack and phone Matthews Phosa in Mpumalanga. He tells me, fairly irritably, that eveyone knows that his former MEC for Safety and Security, Steve Mabona (he of the driving licence/Deputy Speaker saga) is no longer in his Cabinet. But, I insist, he’s still in the legislature? I get a grumbling “Yes”.
I don’t find any of this much fun. Enough police have quoted Mabona at us in the past few weeks of filming (if he can get away with it, why shouldn’t we?) to make the point that they are listening to their new masters; they aren’t automatically part of old-time scams where drug-lords and cops had neat friendships.
Today the situation is far worse – from high up to low down, from fiddle to cartel.
The new anti-corruption units within the police force are impressive. The genuine, likeable director, Stef Grobler, talks sadly about his own loss of trust. His men work long hours to catch their own. They have to tap telephones, wait in freezing conditions, pretend to lie, extort and bribe, and go in with a gun at the crunch. They are afraid to trust anyone.
Officially they were able to charge more than 2 000 men last year; unofficially we are told that at least half the force is in it.
I talk to more of the experts – Sydney Mufamadi’s adviser and the SAPS director of the National Inspectorate, Piet du Toit. Both agree we are not being tough enough.
In New York, half of all police were fired: crime came down drastically. In Hong Kong, they can legally check where the money came from for the new Porsche or the smart house. In New South Wales, they’re planning to fire cops without going through interminable court procedures …
In South Africa, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are supreme. A policeman plans to challenge, in the courts, his removal from Richmond to another police station, in the aftermath of the slayings there.
In Johannesburg, the majority of the police stationed at the City Deep container depot are moved elsewhere – days later, one container, with handguns worth R500 000, disappears. This is not necessarily big cartel stuff, but it is un-settling when cops get moved, not fired.
Do the politicians have the political will to get tougher, to change the law? Do they actually have the courage to say to their fellow politicians that the job and the privileges and the money go if their lives are not clean as clean, splinternuut?
I don’t think we can comfortably blame this one on apartheid any more.
— Beata Lipman co-directed a documentary, Cops and Robbers, to be screened on SABC 3 on Monday at 10 pm