Ivor Powell
A government official in the former ministry of law and order helped to build South Africa’s multibillion-rand private security industry into a private army by changing the country’s legislation.
This ensured that the industry became an apartheid private army and that an old- guard network holds the reins in a business that the government has repeatedly identified as a haven for third-force elements to this day.
Minutes of the Security Officers Board (SOB) – the statutory body charged with regulating the security industry – show that former minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok’s legal adviser, Paul Kruger, was pivotal to promulgating regulations that disempowered the board just as the new government was seeking to appoint its own representatives to it.
In the minutes for April 1997 the board’s deputy chair, Professor Hans Visser, records that he was dealing with Kruger on amending regulations.
The minutes also show that the new regulations were never discussed with or approved by the board. While there are various points in the official records where the proposed new regulations are mentioned, nowhere is the substance of the changes spelt out.
Nor were the regulations ever distributed to the security industry for scrutiny, comment and amendment – as is specified in government procedure.
The new regulations were introduced at a time when the Ministry of Safety and Security was interviewing candidates for an interim security officers board to oversee the industry and assess the functioning of the SOB while new legislation was being drafted.
However, as reported recently in the Mail & Guardian, at least three members appointed by the African National Congress-led government to the interim board have been deprived of access to records that would allow them to do the job they were given.
Kruger is currently a senior official in the Department of Safety and Security. In the late 1980s he and Vlok were involved in setting up the first incarnation of the SOB as a joint initiative of the private security industry and the South African Police – largely as a paramilitary adjunct to the police.
Visser confirmed that he, SOB registrar Patrick Ronan and Kruger had drafted amendments to the regulations. He claimed that the Department of Safety and Security was responsible for publishing the proposed amendments for comment before it was promulgated.
Kruger said the responsibility lay with the SOB. He confirmed that its board was responsible for any amendments to regulations.
The aims of the SOB – which at the time was dominated by three companies, Springbok Patrols, Fidelity Guards and Coin Security – were threefold.
Firstly, to regulate the industry in such a way as to keep out undesirable and fly-by- night operators. Secondly, to constitute itself as a private army as an auxiliary force to the apartheid state in its fight against the liberation movements. The private security companies would largely assume responsibility for guarding and protecting national key points like fuel installations, power plants and broadcast facilities.
The last aim was made possible by the almost simultaneous promulgation of the National Key Points Act of 1989, which empowered private security companies to perform sensitive security functions in the national interest – as well as creating a regimen of police-type training for those involved in tasks like guarding key points. Training manuals for the industry today still refer to the liberation movements as “the enemy”.
These moves were followed up in the early 1990s by a series of meetings between then South African Police deputy commissioner General Basie Smit and representatives of the inner circle of the private security industry, including Springbok Patrols, Coin and Fidelity Guards, with a view to setting up formal partnerships to give the private operators powers parallel with those of the police.
Ten years later, in 1997, after the ANC (the “enemy” of the 1980s) had come to power, the effect of legislative changes introduced to regulations governing the industry was precisely in the opposite direction – to give the board fewer powers and instead to transfer the virtual monopoly of power in running the industry to the office of the SOB’s registrar. At more or less the same time Ronan, then acting registrar, was appointed to the position of registrar.
Both Ronan and his deputy, Peter Birch, have been accused by security company operators of manipulating procedures to the disadvantage of small security companies and those outside the old-guard loop.
In June 1997 SOB chief inspector AJJ du Plooy signed a directive placing certain companies above the law. It forbids inspectors to conduct investigations against a specified list of members of the board, including Springbok Patrols’s Mick Bartmann, his close associate Don Masterson, and supposed employee representative Mzwandile Simon -who wears a Transport and General Workers’ Union hat on the SOB, but was exposed as being the owner of a security company in the M&G two weeks ago.
Simon’s ISS Security is registered to Ronan and Birch’s Bedfordview business address and Birch’s own postal address.
The M&G is also in possession of a tender application by Simon’s company submitted after inspecting a site in his capacity as a board member with Birch – who as registrar had access to rival tender applications.
These are just individual instances. Former SOB member Jenny Ibbotson – who resigned in late 1997 – believes the problem lies in the way the board was put together in the first place.
“You can’t regulate the industry from inside,” Ibbotson argues. “That was the first mistake. What needs to be protected here are the interests of the public. But what the SOB was set up to do was look after interests inside the industry.”