Gustav Thiel
Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi’s plans to tie the entire police force into performance contracts could be throttled by a lack of funds.
The plans, which Mufamadi unveiled in February, were vaunted as a key step toward lifting police performance – rewarding the good and punishing slackers – in a strategy designed to shore up flagging public confidence in the police. Even National Police Commissioner George Fivaz was supposed to sign a performance contract.
But Mufamadi’s office says there are no funds available to launch the contracts, nor to reward top performers, and no one is sure who should be responsible for evaluating police efforts.
Fivaz’s office adds that “there are a lot of legal issues still to be sorted out.” The recently appointed chief executive of the South African Police Service, businessman Meyer Kahn, declines to comment.
Mufamadi’s failure to get the plans off the ground is likely to fuel criticism that policing policy is based too much on fanfare announcements, rather than practical implementation on the ground.
When the minister announced the plans, he said the contracts would be designed to ensure that all police officers could be “properly” evaluated.
Fivaz went further, warning that “heads are likely to roll at all levels” after a major evaluation of “performance, service and productivity”.
Mufamadi wanted Fivaz to sign a contract stipulating that he would be fired if he did not meet his performance targets.
Mufamadi and Fivaz also promised to implement the plans quickly and they set up a committee, which included the head of the Safety and Security Secretariat, Azhar Cachalia.
Mufamadi’s office says negotiations “about the nature of the contracts are in a very sensitive stage … At this stage it is safe to say the discussions about the contracts are considered a high priority. Their ultimate aim is to provide a better level of policing in this country,” says representative Thembi Mboisa.
But a lack of cash and bickering about responsibility for the evaluations “made any announcement about the contracts impossible”. Fivaz has not signed his performance contract.
“We simply do not know where the money will come from for these performance contracts,” Mboisa adds. “We are not even sure whether the performance contracts will become a reality.”