Four years ago this week SA was burning, the state apparatus caught so unawares that our nation’s finest could only haplessly look on as businesses were looted, torched and some 354 people lost their lives in the bedlam.
Bheki Cele, the cowboyish Minister who’d popularized the buddy cop ‘shoot to kill’ was seemingly out of his depth, appearing on TV to deliver emasculated updates on the orgy of looting that was being teleported in real time into our living rooms.
The visuals were Armageddon; marauding pillagers setting fire to buildings, helping themselves to the illicit bounty and even butchering their fellowmen in cold blood. And, if there ever was a more indisputable indicator that something was not quite right with the SA Police Service, it was when the taxi industry – notorious for a certain blend of strong-arming and vigilantism – was out helping the ‘tired’ police force. In some of the footage, it was them doing much of the dispersing, chasing and shooting.
The speculative post-mortem afterwards? It was Jacob Zuma, arrested just days earlier following a contempt of court ruling in refusing to appear before the Commission of Enquiry into State Capture. Scenes leading up to the arrest at his Nkandla homestead were a tense affair. Supporters brandishing weapons at the gate; Zuma’s son Edward vowing that it would be over his dead body before his father would be sent to prison and ‘mayikhale’ was a battle cry raging on the socials. Both police minister Bheki Cele and his commissioner Gen Khehla Sitole were tithering, both writing to the Constitutional Court practically asking whether to go ahead with the arrest even though they’d been clearly directed to do so.
That is to say law enforcement would’ve been shown convincing red flags of an imminent uprising by the time the former president was spirited off to hand himself over at the Estcourt Correctional Centre. Zuma’s arrest, says Cele on a podcast interview, ‘was coming with trouble. You [could] see that if he goes to his incarceration, there was going to be a problem.’
Of this much, Cele had received sufficient intelligence that something was, indeed, brewing and having always had close ties with his former underground MK commander, he approached both Cyril Ramaphosa and then acting ANC secretary-general Jesse Duarte asking permission to plead with Zuma to at least appear before the commission. That was the three-and-a-half hour long meeting that spawned rumours of Cele supposedly gone to have tea with the former president instead of putting cuffs on him.
KwaZulu-Natal, says Cele, had always been a tribal province centered around The Zulu king, the late Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Zuma, then appointed as the provincial Chairperson who was tasked with quelling the political bloodbath of the 1990s in that province.
KZN police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s recent explosive allegations of a criminal syndicate infiltrating the police and intelligence service, as well as top officials and the judiciary have resulted in the placing on ‘leave of absence’ of current police minister Senzo Mchunu and have reawokened questions around the functioning of the service in general and its capability to effectively deal with large-scale threats in particular. The internal differences are nothing new. In the lead-up to the 2021 Riots, Cele admits to not having had a good relationship with his own commissioner, Sitole, at the time.
Cele’s first order of duty during the bedlam was to move much of his operations to the troublesome KZN but was soon personally ‘grounded,’ having contracted Covid. He would cut his quarantine short on the third day when he visited Alexander. Although quick to praise the efforts of his forces in this Soweto township, one recalls that even there, it was where Nhlanhla Lux, hitherto an obscure figure would find his claim to national prominence. In military fatigues, he and his entourage captivated the people’s hearts when they stood before the cameras, seemingly the last line of defence against the looting of Maponya Mall.
In the chaos, commissioner Mkhwanazi was something of a maverick. When looters were gathering outside a certain shopping centre in Westerville, Durban, he broke the rules by sending in the special task force, the last line ‘when chips are down.’ Cele again sings the praises of his men but concedes that mistakes were made and the hardest-hit by these were township businesses whom the cops could not save, some of which haven’t recovered since.
In Cele’s words Mkhwanazi ‘is highly-decorated… one of the top, top special task force guys. A real cop.’ But, in the face of the evidence, is that enough to weed out the apparent institutional issues so as to more capably tackle the nation’s crime issues? Many parties have gained popularity on the ticket of ‘greater police visibility’ and other promises to combating crime. Yet SA continues to top nearly all studies conducted on the subject.
In a ten year survey (1990 – 2000) by the UN Office on Drugs and crime, SA took second and first place per capita respectively for assault and rape out of 60 other countries. Murder rates have consistently been on the up for the past five years. We remain amongst the most murderous society out of a war zone in the world.
Cele himself laments how the service has regressed since his stint as national commissioner, with certain units being disbanded and the number of officers decreasing even though the crime figures and population are growing. Thus it should come with little surprise that ‘with just over a fifth of citizens having faith in the police since 2022, according to a survey’ by the Human Sciences Research Council published this Monday, SAPS is losing confidence with the people it’s meant to serve.
The survey shows that faith in the police has been on a decline since 1998, showing pronounced dips in the aftermath of the Mariana Massacre and the July Riots. This then might explain the proliferation of commandos on farms, community policing forums and, sadly, the increasingly common practice of vigilantism in Western Cape townships. There may be a storm of debate around both Mkhwanazi’s safety as well as Mchunu’s leave but the deeper question remains: can the police service be truly cleansed of all its demons? Without a reliable, crime-fighting network, all endeavours will inevitably be stalled.