Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Breaking through the closed ranks
When the inquiry into Riah Phiyega gets under way it will focus on what she did after the Marikana killings, writes Craig Dodds
PARLIAMENT’s police oversight committee has a reputation for being a hard taskmaster, going back at least as far as the Bheki Cele days, when current Deputy Transport Minister Sindi Chikunga was its chair.
Over the years, police managers have been subjected to numerous public bollockings for misdemeanours ranging from dodgy figures provided in annual reports to the loss of official firearms, often packing their bags for the trip back to Pretoria with their tails between their legs.
This makes for great theatre and provocative headlines, yet it hasn’t necessarily resulted in improved SAPS performance or more robust accountability.
If anything, it may have honed the police top brass’s talent for obfuscation, with Cele’s successor as national commissioner, Riah Phiyega, leading from the front in this department.
When an inquiry into her fitness for office gets under way – as recommended by the Marikana Commission of Inquiry the killings – it will not be focused primarily on her role in the deeply flawed planning process that resulted in the shooting by the police of 34 miners, but on her behaviour after the tragedy, when she is alleged to have encouraged and tacitly (at least) endorsed an attempted cover-up.
The report of the commission is littered with examples of police attempts to mislead it, withhold information and evade questions.
Senior commanders testified that the plan they implemented on August 16, 2012, had been carefully worked out in consultation with public order policing officers and had been in place for two days, while it emerged later the plan was cooked up on the morning of the shooting, with no input from public order commanders.
Minutes were doctored and original recordings of meetings mysteriously lost.
There was “at least” a prima facie case that Phiyega must have known the SAPS had submitted a false account of the events, the Farlam report says in making its recommendation that she face a board of inquiry.
In other words, faced with the demand to explain what had gone wrong at Marikana, and in front of an inquiry appointed by President Jacob Zuma for this purpose, the police at the highest level pretty much sat around a table and agreed to show the president and the country their collective middle finger
– Judge Ian Farlam
and refused to be held accountable.
Considering the magnitude of what had happened, this was shocking confirmation that senior police managers believed they were a law unto themselves, but they were not done yet.
When Zuma duly wrote to Phiyega informing her officially of the Farlam recommendations and asking for her response, they rallied to her defence.
One day before the deadline for Phiyega to respond, divisional commissioner for human resources Lieutenant General Lineo Ntshiea issued a statement under the heading, “Hands off General Riah Phiyega”, in which she praised her boss for the service’s “achievements” under her “sterling leadership”.
Considering the damning findings against Phiyega contained in the Farlam report, this statement could be matched in its perversity only by Phiyega’s own infamous address to her troops the day after Marikana in which she described their actions as “the best of responsible policing”, while 34 mineworkers lay dead.
Then, the day after Phiyega had made her submission to Zuma, the board of commissioners, representing the top operational commanders in the country, issued another statement in her support, praising her efforts to turn the service around and denying, as had been reported in some media, that the police management intended to distance itself from the SAPS submission to the Farlam inquiry – the same submission in which it gave a false account of events.
Within two weeks the generals were summoned to Parliament to explain this apparent undermining of the president’s authority.
They argued they had been responding to media reports of a