Police commissioner Riah Phiyega is seemingly unable to remove the stain of her unconvincing testimony last week to the Farlam commission of inquiry into the deaths of 34 people at Marikana. And her cross-examination this week may be the beginning of a downward spiral in terms of public perception. Questions are beginning to be asked about what her testimony means for her future – political or otherwise.
Her duel with evidence leader Mbuyiseli Madlanga was like the type of boxing bout that is memorable for all the wrong reasons: dismal for the gallery but sweet for Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa's ears. Her performance showed she was resolute when it came to cushioning the political and moral blows for her boss. At the same time it erased any hint of sincerity from her earlier apology to the families of those killed by the police at the Marikana mine on August 16 last year.
What lies ahead after her cross-examination next week will supersede whatever damage her public persona has already suffered. If Phiyega did indeed believe that a video clip in which she called the police's actions on August 16 an example of "the best of responsible policing" was best followed by an apology, her time on the stand personified a callous insensitivity.
First, she distanced Mthethwa from the tactical build-up to August 16 by generalising his role as that of non-operational political support. This was despite the insistence of National Union of Mineworkers president Senzeni Zokwana, during his earlier testimony, that the minister promised to do "all that is possible to deploy the requisite number of officers on the mine".
Phiyega also stood by the "self-defence" press statement she issued on August 17 last year, despite being surrounded by evidence to the contrary. This includes the evidence of Warrant Officer Hendrich Myburgh, a Mahikeng dog unit member, who approached her with an eyewitness account of the unprovoked execution of an injured miner.
Scene two
She also equivocated over the existence of a "scene two" – described in her own statement as the "high bushy ground" where police were later "forced to utilise maximum force to defend themselves" – saying only that "it could be" when specifically asked about it by Madlanga.
Phiyega comes across as a person keenly aware of all that hangs in the balance.
"If she can't protect who she's supposed to protect, she becomes a liability on the political level," a legal source close to the commission said. "If people think her leadership ability is not where it needs to be, there will be calls for her resignation. Some of it will be political and some of it will be genuinely about her leadership lapses. It's really weak to say 'I just read a statement', at least on the 17th [of August], but by now you are supposed to have shown the initiative to know the facts."
Independent policing researcher David Bruce added that, in South Africa, credibility doesn't influence how government officials evaluate their peers' fitness for office. "The point where she should have stood down was after the massacre," he said. "If she didn't stand down then, there is nothing worse than the massacre itself that is going to happen. She might be harmed in the eyes of the public but it is not going to affect her job security. The way she has been conducting herself is not necessarily a survival thing, but more her understanding of how the authority system works – that she needs to take direction. She sees herself as being subject to political authority."
Whatever this means for Phiyega, politically and in the eyes of the public, she has already reached the point of no return. "She's come out badly – and not only in the media," said political analyst Richard Pithouse. "I was in a meeting of shack dwellers in Durban last week … this was a meeting of about three hours, but it kept coming back to her, [with the sentiment being that] if that's what she says about how the police acted on that day [in reference to her congratulatory August 20 speech], then she's not fit to hold office.
"It became a peg that people were hanging everything on. So it's not a media-manufactured hostility toward her, she's clearly become a liability at every level of society … but she might be rewarded for helping her superiors look after themselves."
Troubling as her August 20 address was (in which she said that police action on August 16 "represents the best of responsible policing"), it remains perhaps the only public display of a semblance of confidence in an environment in which she continues to be undermined.
Whether or not she gets the political protection she now seeks, her stint as a witness at the commission may well be remembered as the place where her reputation as a person of considerable stature in her past corporate endeavours came to die.