Top cop’s passion to uplift her community
SHE’S a Catholic and a cop.
Police Major-General Victoria Mekute has become a patron of the Napier Centre 4 Healing, which was launched for drug rehabilitation at Ekukhanyeni Mission Station near Verulam this week.
Mekute is president of the local Catholic Women’s Association and top legal adviser for the force in KwaZulu-Natal.
“Yes, I’m a Catholic and a cop,” Mekute said at the function, where she chose to wear the uniform of her church office.
“You know when you are a believer, when you are a Christian, you’re guided by certain principles,” she said.
“The first principle is honesty. Be honest to the core. Be honest with the work you are doing. You cannot separate police work from your spiritual work.
“As much as by investigating crime we are providing safety and security, we are also looking at the social aspect of crime, the root cause of crime.”
To her, that means getting involved in prevention programmes in the community.
“If an addiction leads a person to commit a crime and we intervene and assist this person, it means crime is going to be reduced.”
She has asked her underlings to join homeless people for a night in the streets to get to know their lives and hopes to go herself when the next campaign takes place.
But next time there will be no police taking camping chairs for comfort. She wants police to sleep on the ground and “get the gist of what the homeless are feeling”.
Mekute arrived in Durban as chief legal adviser for the police during the Fifa World Cup. “I had to advise with regards to safety at the stadium. I was highly involved in that.”
Born and bred in Mafikeng, North West, where she studied law at the province’s university, she joined the police 35 years ago and has been accepted to the Bar.
The Napier Centre will initially accommodate 14 men with the secondary care that most addicts require, including training for employment.
“Statistics are alarming – the state rehab facilities boast less than a 2% success rate,” said Cardinal Wilfred Napier.
It is hoped that the centre will be a showpiece other organisations can copy.
Among the guests was Gad Avnon, whose Harmony rehabilitation centre near Greytown was hailed as an example for the Napier Centre.
Avnon said he started it 25 years ago when a woman asked if her heroin-addicted children could visit his dairy farm to get away from the drug scene in the city.
“We decided it was more important to help others than to grow more crops, so we sold the farm and I went to study theology and psychology to become a pastoral counsellor.”
Avnon put the spike in drug addiction down to the disintegration of family structures over the past decade.