Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Selebi: unrepentant to the end
Mourners pay their last respects to controversial former police chief
JACOB Sello Selebi, better known as Jackie, was not a man who admitted easily to his mistakes. Even as his friend convicted druglord Glen Agliotti revealed in court how he funded the police commissioner’s lavish lifestyle, Selebi remained indignant: “I would never sell my soul, or my country for money,” he told the South Gauteng High Court.
Agliotti paid Selebi more than R1.2 million in bribes – in return for favours – and he testified how the two enjoyed regular shopping sprees.
A flashy dresser with a crop of salt-and-pepper hair and a penchant for expensive clothes, Selebi once spent R56 000 on suits, ties, shirts and shoes at Grays, a luxury outfitter in Sandton. He admitted to carrying R25 000 in cash to pay his account at the same store.
Steely- eyed and defiant, Selebi famously declared of Agliotti: “He’s my friend. Finish and klaar.”
It was Selebi’s “generally corrupt relationship” with Agliotti that signalled his fall from grace after a 40- year career that saw him lead the ANC Youth League, represent South Africa at the UN, and serve as Interpol president.
Selebi was born on March 7, 1950 in Joburg. He studied teaching, and pupils from a high school in Pimville where he taught described him as a fan of Mafia novels who “always had an eye for a quick buck”, and who cut deals by selling books and stationery to pupils at discount prices, according to journalist Adriaan Basson in Finish and Klaar: Selebi’s fall from Interpol to the Underworld.
In 1987 Selebi was elected leader of the ANC Youth League, while in exile in Zambia. In 1991, he was in charge of repatriating ANC exiles, and was then elected MP in the first post-1994 Parliament. His stature grew, and between 1995 and 1998 he served as South Africa’s ambassador to the UN.
Between 1998 and 1999 he served as a director-general of the Foreign Affairs Department, and in 2000 Selebi’s star shone brightest when he was appointed the first black chief of police – and Interpol president four years later.
Editorials largely showered him with praise, even though he was a political appointee with no policing experience.
He reportedly refused to wear a uniform, and steadfastly maintained that he was a manager, not a police officer.
In Bad Public Leadership: Jackie Selebi as a Case Study, Professor Erwin Schwella of Stellenbosch University notes that Selebi was a “notoriously arrogant” man who ruled with “fear, injury and insult”.
His fall from grace was swift. In September 2007, the National Prosecuting Authority issued Selebi with a warrant of arrest for corruption, fraud, racketeering and defeating the ends of justice.
Recalcitrant at first, thenpresident Thabo Mbeki was forced to place him on an extended leave of absence. In 2008 Selebi resigned from Interpol, which had described him as an “honourable” man.
At his corruption trial, Judge Meyer Joffe described Selebi as a “person of low moral fibre” who was an “embarrassment” to South Africa and the police, and a “stranger to the truth”.
He sentenced him to 15 years’ imprisonment for taking bribes from Agliotti. But Selebi remained defiant to the end, always stating that his corruption trial was a political conspiracy by the NPA. He famously remarked: “These hands are clean. I’m not involved in any criminality.”
After his final appeal failed, he collapsed at his home, reportedly while watching the Supreme Court of Appeal’s dismissal of his appeal on live TV.
Selebi, however, served less than a year of his prison term. In July 2012, he was released on medical parole after the Correctional Services Department termed his condition “terminal” and “irreversible”.
Reportedly unknown even to his legal team, Selebi had end-stage renal disease brought on by diabetes, for which he received dialysis three times a day. Then, in October 2013 Beeld newspaper photographed Selebi shopping, branding his a “miraculous recovery”.
Selebi said of the photograph: “The only time it gets difficult is when you get people who give you an impression that they cannot wait for you to die. They don’t say it, but from what they do, you get an impression that these people just can’t wait that I die.”
Selebi, 64, died early yesterday at the Jacaranda Hospital in Pretoria.
He leaves his wife Anne and two children.