Dark side of police’s classified documents ... and the silver lining
It is a rarity to see a hardened policeman cry in public. When Col Kobus Roelofse, a senior investigator of the elite investigations unit, the Hawks, broke down on national television on Thursday, it underscored years of frustration while investigating the alleged looting of the SA Police Service’s (SAPS) crime intelligence slush fund and those high up in the unit, such as its former boss, Richard Mdluli.
Roelofse methodically went through the different investigations he had conducted in relation to the fund.
On his third day of testimony to the commission of inquiry into state capture, chaired by deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo, he was momentarily unable to continue reading an email he had sent to one of his superiors after fraud and corruption charges were dropped against Mdluli on July 6 2015. The official line was that he needed to attend to outstanding investigations.
Roelofse had written in the email that the magistrate in that matter was saying that the case could only be placed back on the court roll once classified documents were declassified.
Four years after that e-mail was sent, Roelofse is still hitting a wall in his attempts to have those documents declassified.
Roelofse made multiple hairraising allegations, but it was his inability for the better part of a decade to have documents needed for prosecution declassified that appeared to astonish Zondo. The judge returned to these challenges the Hawks investigator faced again and again while he gave evidence.
On the second day of Roelofse’s testimony, Zondo said the courts should be approached, as they could determine whether there are proper grounds to refuse to declassify documents. Roelofse said he agreed but that he was still in the police and “I do not think the SAPS is going to take the SAPS to court”.
On Friday, Zondo said he would hear what some of the people implicated in Roelofse’s testimony had to say, but it was “just astonishing” that Roelofse, who is part of SA’s law enforcement, was not helped to obtain documents he needed for an investigation into what appeared to be legitimate issues of corruption and fraud within the police.
Zondo asked Roelofse whether anything in the documents could affect state security. The colonel said no, as they merely related to the acquisition of assets and it was more of a supply chain management issue.
What his evidence did show was that the processes in place to declassify documents could be abused to protect those implicated in them. This would be contrary to the minimum information security standards (MISS), which clearly state “security measures are not intended and should not be applied to cover up maladministration, corruption, criminal actions, etc, or to protect individuals/officials involved in such cases”.
Prof Jane Duncan from the University of Johannesburg’s department of journalism, film & television said given the success in fighting the Protection of State Information Bill, SA was in a “bizarre” position to be stuck with MISS. This is “likely an unconstitutional document”, as is the apartheid-era Protection of Information Act, which governs the classification and declassification of documents.
David Lewis, executive director of Corruption Watch, said the classification of documents is clearly open to abuse, but is part of a bigger problem: SA’s default position is that information has to be asked for instead of being supplied from the start.
Roelofse’s testimony showed while law enforcement seems to have been abused for political ends, some officials doggedly continue to do the work they are supposed to do — even when it is clearly not welcome.
It is a silver lining on what is still a long road to uncover the true extent of state capture.