DIS: The haunted house
In order to grasp the pains of power, we must talk to those who have it, and to know its pleasures, we must talk about those who seek it. When I heard that, Lance Corporal Paul ‘ Slim Shady’ Setlhabi and Pulane Kgoadi are between a rock and hard place, I could not believe it. And I am not the only one. How could it be? I cannot dare imagine the pair taking off their shoes in preparation to enter police cells; it is not possible.
How could the police dare incarcerate the ‘ law’ itself? It is unfathomable! Even in the weirdest of dreams. Slim and Kgoadi were not your ordinary ‘ law enforcement’ officers; they were the law itself. Permit me to emphatically repeat; they were peremptorily the law.
By the law I do not mean, being the face of it or the long arm of, I mean they were a jurisdiction on their own. As exactly how Slim and Kgoadi ended up wielding so much power, remains a mystery even for the most talented minds.
But nothing is surprising anymore. In case you are, welcome to Brigadier Peter Magosi’s world. Here, there is no line between fiction and reality. Wherever Slim and Kgoadi are, they, at least, should have courage to look Magosi straight in the eyes and say, “Listen to me, Frankenstein.
You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with asatisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!”
For indeed, these are Magosi’s creatures. They are his very own design. He cannot now disown them, because they have gone rogue. They were deliberately designed to be rogue. They are just being, what they were meant to be. They cannot be otherwise. It is just the nature of the beast.
Let us not shy away from undeniable facts, like Isaac Kgosi, Magosi is now a prisoner of his own design. And no matter how hard he tries; he cannot kill the beast. The unravelling of Slim and Pulane’s power, is best captured in Revelations where it says, “And the dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.”
Permit me to once again repeat; Slim and Kgoadi had grown uncontrollably powerful. Since its inception, the DIS has been a soap opera. The DIS, the notorious DIS, has proven beyond doubt not only to be Neodymium magnet of controversy, but also a bottomless pit of public funds. The agency has turned out to be the proverbial ‘ Frankenstein monster.’
For those in power, the DIS is a convenient tool to employ with satisfied conscience against dissenting voices and political opponents, ( real and imagined). But as we now see with Kgosi and Ian Khama, the DIS is a ‘ maga dog.’ It is turning around to bite them.
Probably the same fate awaits the current political elite, who for now, think it is an obedient ‘ bulldog.’ It may be hard to swallow this bitter pill fellow countrymen, but since its inception, the DIS has not behaved anyhow different from its current display. Kgosi or Magosi, Kgoadi or Butterfly; the agency remains irredeemable.
Stories of those who have been in the torture chambers of Slim and Kgoadi, are but, absolute horror. They tell of conditions of confinement and the use of unauthorised interrogation and conditioning techniques that are cruel, inhuman, and degrading.
They speak of interrogation techniques such as slaps and walling ( slamming suspects against a wall) used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity. Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.
Since assuming the position of chief- spy, Magosi has been nothing but a grand circus show. The blunders, legal and otherwise, have seen us becoming the laughing stock of all nations. The political burden, insurmountable. The national shame, indescribable.
But contrary to boundaries of logic, Magosi still stands. He still retains his position as chiefspy. The ‘ transition’ of DIS from Kgosi to Magosi has turned out to be nothing more than just a cosmetic surgery. Instead of dressing the wound, we applied make- up.