Johannesburg - Lieutenant-General Solomon Makgale seems to have become the first casualty of the fallout following the suspension of national police commissioner Riah Phiyega.
The Sunday Independent can confirm that Makgale, the spokesman of Phiyega, vacated his office on Friday after being replaced by Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi, who is also the spokesman for the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI), known as the Hawks.
Lieutenant-General Khomotso Phahlane was appointed acting national commissioner of the police by President Jacob Zuma after Phiyega was suspended two weeks ago on full pay.
Phiyega faces an inquiry into her fitness to hold office following the release of the Farlam Commission’s Marikana report.
Phiyega, appointed in 2012, two months before the Marikana massacre, will be probed on her leadership, decisions and actions during the violence in Marikana in August 2012 which led to the deaths of 34 miners.
Mulaudzi confirmed he had been appointed the official spokesman of Phahlane and the SAPS.
The changes in the office of the national police commissioner come at a time when Parliament’s police committee is combing through transcripts and documents to determine whether police generals lied to them recently when they were summoned for public statements they released in August in support of their embattled boss.
The parliamentary inquiry will resume on Wednesday.
Chairman of Parliament’s portfolio committee on police, Francois Beukman, has ordered the attendance register of a top management police meeting that took place in Magoebaskloof, Limpopo, on July 15 and 16 to be made available on Wednesday.
It was at that meeting that a decision by the SAPS board of commissioners was taken to issue a statement in support of Phiyega. They were later made to publicly retract the statement and to apologise.
Beukman told MPs earlier on Wednesday that the statement was released on August 1, two weeks after those meetings.
He said: “There were not just the nine commissioners, there were other divisional commissioners. It’s quite clear that they could have understood that signing it may have been overstepping the line. And I think that is very significant.”
He added that it should be viewed in a positive light that not everybody in senior police management signed the statement as it showed there were certainly “people who know the rules”.
The inquiry in terms of Rule 201 of the National Assembly Rules will scrutinise, among other things:
* Statements issued by senior management members of the police and provincial commissioners during July and August 2015 in support of the national commissioner, General Riah Phiyega;
* The process leading up to the issuing of the statements with specific reference to the meeting of the SAPS board of commissioners that was held at Magoebaskloof on July 15 and 16, 2015.
* Statements made by senior management and provincial commissioners during the portfolio committee meetings of August 12, 18 and 19, 2015;
* A statement issued by Lieutenant-General Solomon Makgale on August 13 and individual statements issued by senior commissioners in support of the national commissioner.
The inquiry will also establish and consider whether the respective officers were truthful with their testimony in presenting the facts leading up to the issuing of the said statements and whether the documents and electronic material made available to the committee verify the statements made during the said committee meetings.
The Sunday Independent
* E-mail your opinion to [email protected] and we will consider it for publication or use our Facebook and Twitter pages to comment on our stories. See links below.