Let’s finally appoint the right top cop
PARLIAMENT’S portfolio committee on police met yesterday to discuss recommendations that suspended Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega be fired. She has no intention of going quietly. She has doggedly fought the findings of the Claassen Report into her fitness to hold office, which was instituted after Judge Ian Farlam’s commission of inquiry into the Marikana massacre.
Farlam’s report urged that the national police commissioner should have her fitness to hold office officially probed.
Judge Neels Claassen duly did this and found she should have foreseen that 34 miners would be killed during labour unrest at Lonmin’s platinum mine in Marikana in August 2012 when she gave the green light to the police on the ground.
The commission also found she was an unsatisfactory witness, tried to avoid taking responsibility for what happened and breached her duty by not managing the police openly and transparently.
It’s a damning indictment, but it should be because Marikana is an ineradicable stain on our national psyche.
The truth is that Marikana, notwithstanding Phiyega’s performance, has been – to put it politely – underwhelming at best. She’s been a danger to the morale and efficiency of the force, not least when she warned one of her provincial commissioners of a high-level investigation against him for purported criminal activity.
But then, she’s only one in a long line of seemingly bizarre political appointments to this critically important public service. We’ve had Bheki Cele, who single-handedly re-militarised the police service into a police force and is best remembered for his injunction “shoot-to-kill” as well as his dubious lease agreements with his undeclared interests in them.
Before that we had Jackie Selebi, who befriended a drug lord despite all the evidence to the contrary and even leaked sensitive Interpol documents to him while head of the international body, before being convicted and jailed for corruption for kickbacks he received from Glenn Agliotti for his services.
It’s an unbelievable trifecta of incompetence, corruption and unprofessionalism.
The time is long overdue for a professional career police officer, untainted by any whiff of scandal and not aligned to political heads who may manipulate him, to be appointed and given every help to create a police service that does what it’s supposed to: protect and serve the people of this country without fear or favour.