Johannesburg - Police Minister Nathi Nhleko must be so used to having egg on his face by now that his cheeks feel like rashers of bacon.
Thus he was able to sail through a grilling in Parliament on Wednesday over his belated notice on the appointment of Hawks head Mthandazo Ntlemeza without resorting to the handkerchief he wielded so furiously during the presentation of his report on Nkandla.
Clearly the passage of time and a raft of withering judgments against him have hardened the minister’s immunity to shame.
Yes, it was a requirement of the law that he report to Parliament on the appointment of a new Hawks head within 14 days (not a year later, as he did), said the Police Minister, but this was merely for the purposes of informing it, not to seek its approval.
The appointment of Ntlemeza had in any case complied with all the necessary human resources protocols.
While Nhleko accepted responsibility for the “oversight”, he denied it was an indictment of the legal advice he has been receiving, which has also seen his Nkandla report set aside in the Constitutional Court, along with his suspension of Ntlemeza’s predecessor, Anwa Dramat, and that of Independent Police Investigative Directorate head Robert McBride.
He said the judgments did not necessarily call into question the competence of his legal advisers. This would be true, of course, if it turns out the minister has simply been ignoring the advice he’s received. But his offhand dismissal of concern over his fast and loose relationship with the law will not spare him, or the police officers he is supposed to oversee, the wrath of a citizenry that has lost its respect for authority.
While Nhleko was complaining in Parliament that dealing with public protests was distracting the police from their primary task of fighting crime, his charges were battling the conflagration on university campuses that has spewed out inflammatory images featuring the now familiar props and postures of confrontation.
It doesn’t matter if, as Nhleko argued, the police since Marikana have adopted a “cautious” approach to public protests, evident in the limited number of civilian injuries despite an exponential rise in frequency and violence.
When news bulletins and front pages burst with such images, stained with teargas, blood and ominous phalanxes of armoured public order police, it is they who come to embody the national nightmare of deprivation and the violence it visits on the vulnerable.
It is reckless in the extreme for the Minister of Police to answer this questioning of state legitimacy - brought on in the first place by the disregard of their duty to citizens of some of his cabinet colleagues and their complicity in reproducing obscene disparities in wealth - with casual unconcern for the rule of law. He may argue that his “oversight” is hardly of constitution-breaking proportions but the picking and choosing of which aspects of the law to comply with that has characterised this government is precisely what legitimates, to a degree, the otherwise baldly unlawful behaviour of some of the protesters.
After Marikana, and much of what has followed, the police badly need to reconstitute their authority, a fact that does not escape Nhleko.
He has appointed a transformation task team to prepare the SAPS for a cultural and institutional overhaul that is intended to mould it into the modern, human rights-conscious service it was supposed to become with the fall of apartheid.
Having bungled Ntlemeza’s appointment, Nhleko may just, wittingly or unwittingly, have left the door open for his removal.
Political Bureau