Ipid hampered by a lack of funds
A SECURITY expert warned that lack of funding and resources at the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) made it difficult for the watchdog body to get necessary investigators and equipment.
“That makes it less effective. Misconduct in SAPS is huge as you have more than 200 000 members, so it is difficult for Ipid to perform its mandate,” said Johan Burger of the Institute of Security Studies yesterday.
He made the comments after Ipid told Parliament’s portfolio committee on police this week about its budget constraints.
Ipid’s executive director Robert McBride decried the institution’s inability to achieve full independence with its current funding.
Burger said Ipid faced the same problem as the public protector. “Government pronounces that corruption committed by officials will receive priority, but when providing resources government does not come to the party.”
He blamed the lack of political will and possibly an attempt to render anti-crime and anti-corruption bodies ineffective as the cause for the poor resources allocated to them.
During the portfolio committee meeting McBride also said it needed highly specialised investigators to deal with systematic corruption.
He said a number of posts were frozen because of cost-cutting measures despite an approved “expansion” strategy. He said there was no money for the “expansion” strategy.
The staff complement envisaged in the “expansion” strategy was about 535 as opposed to 400 when Ipid was formed.
Ipid’s investigation and informantion director Matthews Sisoko said it had continuously raised the issue of capacity but the 535 target has yet to be reached.
“We envisaged to have investigative capacity of 516 investigators spread throughout the country,” Sisoko said, adding that one of their main challenge was response time to crime scenes.
McBride and Sisoko also stated that Ipid had incurred unforeseen expenditure as a result of investigations arising from the Farlam Commission.
“We had to use our own budget to do the investigations that we have done up to now,” Sisoko said.