Steve Tshwete had a natural way with journalists, an insecure and prestige-hungry lot whose hearts and minds can be won through their egos. He engaged them seriously and with charm, bore no grudges, and was largely free of the defensiveness typical of many politicians.
This was not a device. His personal warmth and hard-drinking, straight-talking style endeared him to ordinary members of the African National Congress, who addressed him to his face as “Bra Steve” – a liberty they would not take with certain other leaders.
Tshwete had impeccable anti-apartheid credentials, and his tough image as police minister was more than just theatre. He was jailed for 15 years, banned to the one-horse Ciskei town of Peelton on his release, declared a prohibited immigrant in South Africa and repeatedly detained and tortured before skipping the country in 1985.
In the Border area, where he became United Democratic Front president, he played a seminal role in reviving the congress tradition. “He was a rarety in the 1980s, as a man with very strong ANC roots who returned to the semblance of above-ground politics,” remarks journalist Franz Kruger, who knew him in the Eastern Cape.
Few who heard or read it can forget his ringing call to arms at a rally after the Duncan Village massacre in 1985, when he warned that black people, too, had crossed their Rubicon.
Senior ANC communicator Thabo Masebe believes his standing with the party rank and file may also have roots in his militant image as the force behind tactically controversial attacks on white civilians in the late 1980s. After the legalisation of the ANC, he was one of the first leaders to return to South Africa, and as national organiser one of the first to re- establish contact with the grass roots.
The outpouring of grief over his death last week was, one felt, a good deal more heartfelt than over former defence minister Joe Modise.
But none of this can obscure Tshwete’s shortcomings in one of South Africa’s most senior and most sensitive portfolios. He had reliable political instincts and a shrewd feeling for political symbolism, but was short on subtlety and grasp of detail.
All his good and bad points were underscored by his clumsy televised claim last year of a plot by ANC-linked businessmen against President Thabo Mbeki. Undoubtedly motivated by loyalty to the party and its leaders, it was based on intelligence reports from dubious sources, which he misjudged.
As safety and security minister, his hawkish bluster probably restored a measure of public confidence in the government’s commitment to fighting crime, undermined in the immediate post-1994 period by a tendency to dismiss the clamour over the crime rate as a white neurosis.
A recent Markinor survey suggests that, in contrast with all other policy areas, public perceptions of the government’s record on crime have improved slightly in the past two years.
Far less clear is his allegedly positive impact on police morale, trumpeted in most media this week. A commentator who has had extensive contact with ordinary police officers, journalist Jonny Steinberg, believes he was viewed with no more than “benign tolerance”, as another loud-mouthed politician. Policing, he points out, is a job that encourages scepticism about human motives.
Steinberg believes Tshwete’s 1999 roadshow, pitched at the black personnel who make up 60% of the police force, was well-conceived but poorly executed. Demoralised and subverted by decades of menial service in the apartheid security machine, black policemen needed to know government cared about racism in the force.
“He read the signs, but made transparently dishonest promises. Black cops were told they would have new offices and overseas trips, like the whites cops had.” The response was one of “absolute scepticism”.
His morale-boosting endeavours also involved highly controversial suggestions that he would not allow the Constitution’s human rights strictures to favour criminals over law-enforcers.
There were obvious dangers to this in a country where the sovereignty of the Constitution is not fully entrenched in the minds of many politicians, let alone ordinary people.
What he should have done, Steinberg believes, is break the police into the idea of tactical engagement with the Constitution – pushing it to the limits in a quest for more effective crime-fighting. This was the challenge facing police in all constitutional democracies.
The moratorium on crime statistics, allegedly to revise the way they were collected, was another case of clumsy execution. There was certainly scope for placing the figures in context – the reporting of crimes, and thus the apparent incidence, may well rise as police performance improves.
But immediately following unrealised pledges by police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi that he would bring down the crime rate within months, the moratorium looked like a crude cover-up.
The impression was reinforced when it emerged that post- moratorium statistics were being collected in exactly the same way as before.
Tshwete’s single-minded preoccupation with restoring police morale sometimes left the sense that he was more interested in his officers than in the victims of crime. He is said, behind closed doors, to have declared that police personnel should not have to waste energy on interpersonal crime like domestic violence.
Relying exclusively on the advice of his commanders, he reduced to an ineffectual shell the police secretariat designed to exert civilian control over the force.
This is not just a concern of human rights lawyers. Crime-combating is as much a psychological matter as one of forensic methods and infrastructure. A well-policed society is one in which citizens feel officers are responsive, that they can be relied on to rush to the crime scene and make a serious effort to catch the perpetrators.
In marked contrast with his predecessor, Sydney Mufamadi, Tshwete did at least nibble at the most pressing issue in his portfolio – reforming the slow-moving behemoth of the South African Police Service, said to be the second largest centralised force in the world, after China.
Selebi has made a start on the detective service by redeploying certain specialised units, like the Brixton murder and robbery squad, seen as corrupt and inefficient.
For the uniformed branch, the proposed design is based on “sector policing” – specific officers devoted to specific neighbourhoods, where they build close relations and gather intelligence.
Nothing has yet happened on this front. As it will involve a larger force and significantly more spending on infrastructure, it is not clear that the plan is viable.
Tshwete was an authentic person and struggle icon, but seems to have had a hazy grasp of the policy options and to have left policy matters entirely to the upper echelons of the police. His replacement, one hopes, will be a man, or woman, of different gifts.