Breaking through closed ranks in SAPS

National police commissioner Riah Phiyega takes an oath before giving evidence at the Farlam commission of inquiry. File Photo: Themba Hadebe

National police commissioner Riah Phiyega takes an oath before giving evidence at the Farlam commission of inquiry. File Photo: Themba Hadebe

Published Sep 1, 2015

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The inquiry into national police commissioner Riah Phiyega will focus on what she did after the Marikana killings, writes Craig Dodds.

Parliament’s police oversight committee has a reputation for being a hard taskmaster, going back at least as far as the Bheki Cele days, when current Deputy Transport Minister Sindi Chikunga was its chair.

Over the years, police managers have been subjected to numerous public bollockings for misdemeanours ranging from dodgy figures provided in annual reports to the loss of official firearms, often packing their bags for the trip back to Pretoria with their tails between their legs.

This makes for great theatre and provocative headlines, yet it hasn’t necessarily resulted in improved SAPS performance or more robust accountability.

If anything, it may have honed the police top brass’s talent for obfuscation, with Cele’s successor as national commissioner, Riah Phiyega, leading from the front in this department.

When an inquiry into her fitness for office gets under way – as recommended by the Marikana Commission of Inquiry the killings – it will not be focused primarily on her role in the deeply flawed planning process that resulted in the shooting by the police of 34 miners, but on her behaviour after the tragedy, when she is alleged to have encouraged and tacitly (at least) endorsed an attempted cover-up.

The report of the commission is littered with examples of police attempts to mislead it, withhold information and evade questions.

Senior commanders testified that the plan they implemented on August 16, 2012, had been carefully worked out in consultation with public order policing officers and had been in place for two days, while it emerged later the plan was cooked up on the morning of the shooting, with no input from public order commanders.

Minutes were doctored and original recordings of meetings mysteriously lost.

There was “at least” a prima facie case that Phiyega must have known the SAPS had submitted a false account of the events, the Farlam report says in making its recommendation that she face a board of inquiry.

In other words, faced with the demand to explain what had gone wrong at Marikana, and in front of an inquiry appointed by President Jacob Zuma for this purpose, the police at the highest level pretty much sat around a table and agreed to show the president and the country their collective middle finger and refused to be held accountable.

Considering the magnitude of what had happened, this was shocking confirmation that senior police managers believed they were a law unto themselves, but they were not done yet.

When Zuma duly wrote to Phiyega informing her officially of the Farlam recommendations and asking for her response, they rallied to her defence.

One day before the deadline for Phiyega to respond, divisional commissioner for human resources Lieutenant General Lineo Ntshiea issued a statement under the heading, “Hands off General Riah Phiyega”, in which she praised her boss for the service’s “achievements” under her “sterling leadership”.

Considering the damning findings against Phiyega contained in the Farlam report, this statement could be matched in its perversity only by Phiyega’s own infamous address to her troops the day after Marikana in which she described their actions as “the best of responsible policing”, while 34 mineworkers lay dead.

Then, the day after Phiyega had made her submission to Zuma, the board of commissioners, representing the top operational commanders in the country, issued another statement in her support, praising her efforts to turn the service around and denying, as had been reported in some media, that the police management intended to distance itself from the SAPS submission to the Farlam inquiry – the same submission in which it gave a false account of events.

Within two weeks the generals were summoned to Parliament to explain this apparent undermining of the president’s authority.

They argued they had been responding to media reports of a “mutiny” against Phiyega and had had no intention of interfering with the process initiated by Zuma.

Their statement had been intended to bolster morale, they claimed.

But, in the first place, they did not explain why the statement was issued two weeks after they had discussed it, and on the morning after Phiyega had written back to Zuma.

Nor did they offer an adequate reason for deeming it fit to announce their full support for their boss in public – as opposed to simply communicating this to SAPS members via the usual internal channels – given the seriousness of the findings against her.

Far from reassuring the public, as they claimed they had intended to do, it could be argued their unwavering support for such a compromised figure would be more likely to alarm it.

As ANC MP Livhuhani Mabija suggested, the SAPS tendency to close ranks in defence of one of its own is precisely the cause of public distrust.

It is why the conviction this week of eight policemen for the murder of Mozambican Mido Macia, among the many and mounting claims of police brutality, is so unusual.

Still, the SAPS top brass don’t seem to get it.

Only four of the nine provincial commissioners and three divisional commissioners who signed the statement in support of Phiyega have apologised unconditionally – as they were instructed to do by chairman of the police committee Francois Beukman.

The rest have indicated they support a statement issued later that day by police spokesman Solomon Makgale in which the board of commissioners said they wanted to “correct the misconceptions” caused by the earlier statement.

They expressed “regret” for the “unintended consequences of the statement”.

Now the committee is set to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the issuing of the statements in Phiyega’s defence, invoking rules 201 and 138 of the National Assembly.

This is a big step for Parliament, which has never launched such an investigation before.

It may be that it arises from a unique alignment of the political stars, rather than a sudden zeal for accountability.

Recent evidence – from Parliament’s handling of the Nkandla saga to its turning a blind eye to the unlawful removal of members of the SABC board – favours such an interpretation.

But institutions, ultimately, evolve by the setting of precedents.

If we are to have a police service that understands its place in a constitutional democracy, which as Judge Ian Farlam put it in his report, “has a duty of public accountability and truth-telling, because it exercises force on behalf of all South Africans”, then much rides on the police committee’s willingness to stay the course in its investigation.

Parliament is also more than just a forum for shaming delinquent officials.

Much of its work is laborious, uncontroversial and happens under the media radar.

But at least one test of its effectiveness is the extent to which it ensures there are consequences when it finds wrongdoing.

So many scandals could have been prevented, and state resources saved, if Parliament’s oversight committees had acted on information suggesting something was amiss.

Political Bureau

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