It was left to a police officer with two months' experience to make the biggest decision in post-apartheid SA, writes Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
Durban - This week Judge Cornelis Claasen started the probe into National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega’s fitness to hold office.
President Jacob Zuma asked Judge Claasen, assisted by advocates Bernard Khuzwayo and Anusha Rawjee, to establish whether Phiyega and her leadership misled the Marikana Commission of Inquiry by hiding the fact that police decided to implement the option to use maximum force - read “kill if necessary” - against the striking workers at the Rustenburg mine.
The meeting took place the night before the Marikana massacre of 34 miners and the wounding of 78 others.
Judge Farlam has said Phiyega did mislead the commission.
As things stand, Phiyega, former North West provincial commissioner Lieutenant-General Zukiswa Mbombo, provincial officers Major-General Ganasen Naidoo and Brigadier Ledile Malahlela could face criminal charges if the Independent Police Investigative Directorate finds reason for this.
As with the recently concluded Arms Deal commission, the state will once again spend millions of much-needed cash on an outcome that anyone with common sense can see from a mile away.
Mangwashi Victoria Phiyega was never suitable to be a national police commissioner. In fact, one way of establishing Phiyega’s fitness for office, which should have happened before she took the job, would have been to ask her if she thought she was up to it.
If she said yes, then that would be ample proof that she wasn’t the woman for the job. Phiyega couldn’t possibly have been the best woman for such a specialised job. She must have known this. Her CV suggests she’s no airhead. She’s an accomplished woman.
Knowing what I know about our media, I’m sure our investigative journalists would have turned over every stone to find dirt on her and opened every cupboard to find skeletons that would have made her morally and ethically unworthy of the position. They didn’t find anything.
I can’t think of any other job that requires one to be an expert on crime-fighting, prevention and detection, as the chief executive of a 190 000 workforce spread over 1 300 branches across the country.
It also required one to have a thick skin and turn a deaf ear to the people who will blame you for every crime - ranging from cash-van heists to men raping their partners in their homes - and then still have a rubber spine to bend to the will of the powers-that-be. Phiyega should have simply said no. She didn’t and here we are.
Absent from the dock, as it were, would be the person or persons who thought she was fit for office.
In that sense, the Phiyega inquiry is another case of selective accountability. A national police commissioner doesn’t appoint herself.
That it was left to a police officer with two months’ experience to make the biggest decision a law enforcement officer has had to make in post-apartheid South Africa is an indictment on those who appointed her.
I hope the inquiry will establish who appointed her and what they must have promised they would do to compensate for the obvious skills gap.
They would have to explain how they saw the maverick appointment working out.
It is often pointed out, correctly so, that her predecessors Bheki Cele and Jackie Selebi had no policing experience when they were appointed. What these two had between them was the political gravitas and experience of working within a state machinery that invariably makes room for party considerations.
Incidentally, many of those who heaped scorn on the appointments of Cele and Selebi had nothing but praise for the then minister of safety and security (as it was known), Steve Tshwete, when he appointed SAB chairman Meyer Kahn to head the police service.
Kahn replaced General George Fivaz, the only career police officer to have been at the helm of the force (they are a force even if they call themselves a service).
All that Fivaz had going for him was that he was a policeman by training. It wasn’t good enough.
As with Cele, Selebi and Phiyega’s appointments, the consensus was that the job required more than having a cop’s skills.
It needed a tough business head as well as the respect of the political elites, hence Kahn’s optimistic but ultimately futile appointment.
Phiyega will probably be humiliated, to the relish of the many foes she has made since accepting the job. Victims and family members of those massacred at Marikana will find some joy in at least one head rolling.
But as we talk about transformation in the workplace, we must also ask the SAPS and the government an important question: What have they done in the 22 years of democratic government to ensure that they groom a policeman with the right political credentials, academic and business qualifications and respect of their peers to stop the treadmill of national commissioners going nowhere?
* Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya is the editor of The Mercury. Follow him on Twitter @fikelelom
The Mercury