Cape Town -
In the next 100 days, Police Minister Nkosinathi Nhleko says he will visit SAPS offices countrywide, launch a community outreach programme to encourage better relations between the police and citizens, and oversee the opening of four new police stations.
Closer at hand, however, could be his ministry’s involvement in steps to be announced in relation to the five-month-old platinum miners’ strike, which has seen killings and violence in recent weeks.
This emerged during Sunday’s briefing on the ANC national executive committee (NEC) lekgotla which, according to the party’s secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, urged the ministers of police, justice, state security and others in that cluster to ensure security of citizens even amid strikes or protests.
On the policing front, Nhleko said the emphasis would be on a professional, accessible service with uniform standards accountable to South Africans in line with the National Development Plan (NDP), South Africa’s vision to reduce poverty and inequality by 2030, and for an efficient developmental state.
The NDP states personal safety is a human right and outlines a demilitarised police, well-resourced and staffed by skilled professionals who render a professional service with respect for the rights of equality and justice.
Said Nhleko: “We want to focus on the NDP. We can’t do that without a community outreach programme… We’ll continue to investigate and look at ways to improve and increasingly professionalise the police.
“We need to step up efforts to engage with our communities around creating safe and secure communities,” he said, adding policing was about “how the police service renders a service, and how the community sees that service.”
Two weeks into his portfolio the minister continues to be briefed on a job which is a poisoned chalice.
As the political boss, Nhleko is in charge of policy, but implementation of policy, management and operational issues like crowd control are the SAPS’s responsibilities.
For the past two years, amid public turf wars in top police ranks, police brutality and killings have hit the headlines, from the 2011 death during a community protest of Ficksburg activist Andries Tatane and the Marikana killings to the death of Daveyton taxi driver Mido Macia after being dragged behind a police van while handcuffed to it.
The police were acting to ensure zero tolerance of wrongdoing in their ranks, Nhleko said: the number of police officers arrested for fraud and corruption had stabilised at about 20 a month, down from an average of 125 in previous years.