A new top cop on the block

ONLY when you try to imagine what will be required from new police commissioner Riah Phiyega do you realise the enormity of the challenge. She takes over a nightmare. Her predecessor has been disgraced and his predecessor is in jail. The police force is in a lowintensity conflict between factions over the state of police intelligence, which may have been little more than a slush fund for illicit payouts that members of the force were making to themselves. And that is not even to mention the main job at hand — rampant crime.

Ms Phiyega does have a substantial CV. She is currently chairwoman of the presidential review committee on state-owned enterprises and has previously worked as a senior manager both at Transnet, from which she was removed by then new CEO Maria Ramos, and at Absa, which she left almost as Ms Ramos arrived a few years later.

But while her experience in a variety of different institutions is a plus, one of those institutions is not the police, and her lack of experience in the nitty-gritty of policing is going to be a challenge. She is well connected politically, but she is not a politician. That, too, is a plus. In any event, there is an argument that this may in fact not necessarily be a negative; there is no question that the force needs a new broom.

The question is whether she has the sway within the force to in fact sweep clean. Nothing in her past marks her as someone capable of shaking institutions to their core.

While sorting out the fiasco in the police intelligence section will be an immediate priority, it’s important that she looks at the force’s broader institutional challenges. One consideration will be to re-establish the specialist units that her predecessors have shunned. The other is to look at the issues at branch level, and these include the digitisation of charge sheets and evidence.

Whatever the challenges she faces, we wish her well. There are few jobs so crucial and few institutions so badly in need of repair than the police. Policing is a complex affair and the head of the force needs perhaps three crucial facilities: strong political support; strong institutional support; and a strong sense of where the institution should be headed. She at least starts with one of those three, and the others she will have to work at achieving.