His job might just be the most difficult in the land: fixing South Africa’s notorious department of correctional services.
But Vernie Petersen, the newly appointed national commissioner, is ready for the challenge, and a new drum is already beating through this controversial and much-criticised department.
In an unprecedented move by the country’s prisons boss, Petersen addressed stakeholders last week in the first of a series of engagements with civil society. They included organisations representing and reintegrating offenders.
This interaction was non-existent during the regimes of Linda ”Richman” Mti and Khulekani ”Mineshaft” Sithole, Petersen’s predecessors, who departed under a cloud of controversy.
The ”big guy with the small heart” — as his colleagues refer to the soft-spoken Petersen — has a daunting task ahead of him. Overcrowding has reached new levels, the department received its fifth consecutive qualified audit from the Auditor General last year and offender rehabilitation remains elusive at many correctional centres.
But unlike Mti, who has tried to convince Parliament’s vigilant correctional services portfolio committee that all is well, Petersen has a more realistic take on things.
”There are problems. But we must measure how we are doing. We must measure our organisational performance,” Petersen says. He has involved the national treasury to help the department design a system that measures the performance of his officials — from the prison warder in Pofadder to the very senior manager in Pretoria.
Corruption, fraud and irregularities have plagued the department in the past few years.
The Jali Commission of Inquiry has exposed how hundreds of warders are bribed daily in prisons. If an inmate has a bit of money, chances are good that he can get what he wants.
Corruption, however, does not stop at petty misdemeanours, smuggling dagga or CD players.
Mti was exposed last year for having a business relationship with an employee of a group of companies that have benefited from huge departmental contracts. Beeld revealed that the secretary of the Bosasa group, Tony Perry, registered a private company for Mti when Bosasa won tenders from the department for the installation of high-tech security systems, modern fences and new TV sets in prisons.
The newspaper also established that chief financial officer Patrick Gillingham, who manages a budget of more than R8-billion a year, has no tertiary qualifications. Gillingham was seen as one of Mti’s closest allies.
After being exposed, Mti resigned — eight months before his contract with the department ended. He now heads the security portfolio for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. Gillingham was moved out of the department’s headquarters to become the regional commissioner for Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the North West.
Meanwhile, the respected chief deputy commissioner, Jenny Schreiner, is seen as Petersen’s right-hand person; and chief deputy commissioner Jabu Sishuba, who was the acting national commissioner, has taken up a more prominent role in the department.
With the ambitious White Paper on Correctional Services as his handbook, Petersen and his team will strive to find the balance between the harsh reality of criminal behaviour and rehabilitating offenders to successfully reintegrate them into society.
”Needless to say there will be constant tensions between those ideals and what shape they take in reality. But, as a leadership, we are too aware of the importance of knowing the steps we are taking to bring us closer to those ideals, hence a strong emphasis on monitoring and evaluating our performance,” Petersen says.
With a fresh, self-critical management style, officials are optimistic that he might just be the long-awaited Mr Fix-it.
Vernie the straight arrow
Before his appointment as prisons boss, Vivian (Vernie) Patrick Petersen was the regional commissioner of correctional services for Gauteng. Petersen cut his teeth in social welfare as a social worker. In 1996 he was appointed adviser to the minister of social welfare.
In 1998 he was transferred to the department’s Nelspruit office as chief director and in 2004 he was appointed regional commissioner of the department for KwaZulu-Natal. Before transferring to Gauteng, Petersen spent some time as chief deputy commissioner of corporate services in the department.
After his appointment in May this year, Correctional Services Minister Ngconde Balfour expressed his ”absolute” confidence in Petersen, who is known for his ”wealth of knowledge and experience in social activism, advancing democracy, good governance and service delivery improvement”.
Petersen is credited for his work in victim empowerment programmes of NGOs and his contribution to the country’s law reform programme. He has driven the implementation of the seven-day working week for prison warders and an integrated human resources strategy.
Insiders describe him as a ”straight arrow”, whose ”heart is in the right place”. — Adriaan Basson