When Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi appeared for the first time before the parliamentary ad hoc committee hearings in October last year, EFF leader Julius Malema spent 10 minutes of his hour-long engagement with the KZN police commissioner asking about cadre deployment.
The EFF leader, who spent his formative years in politics as an ANC adherent and still fashions himself as an heir to its mythologised revolutionary tradition, wanted to confirm with Mkhwanazi, a career cop, if cadre deployment was responsible for the mess the SAPS finds itself in.
“Those deployment cadres [sic] that came into the SAPS, who had no career in the police – some’s claim to fame [was that] they are from exile, they were underground and they were this and they were that… Do you think they helped improve policing in this country or they deteriorated it to where we find it today?” asked Malema.
“I think the latter part [of the question] is more appropriate,” responded Mkhwanazi.
The integration of groups of individuals from non-statutory forces, such as the ANC’s military wing uMkhonto weSizwe and the PAC’s Apla, into the police service led to the “undermining of the culture of discipline” within the police, he complained. “A police constable started calling a captain ‘comrade’, which was foreign to the police,” he added.
The situation became worse, Mkhwanazi said, after the 2007 ANC national conference as senior police officials became divided along party factional lines. Some generals were even said to be recruiting for Patrick “Terror” Lekota’s Congress of the People when that party broke away from the ANC following then president Thabo Mbeki’s 2008 recall from office.
“The amalgamation of the people who regarded themselves as politicians was the downfall of the discipline of the organisation,” said Mkhwanazi to Malema’s satisfaction. The two agreed with each other that much of the rot was in crime intelligence, the division of the police that – in the early years of SA’s transition from apartheid to democracy – was mostly led by former guerillas.
The exchange would have resonated with many on the political right who have often blamed the country’s dismal record in fighting crime on “deployed cadres” being appointed to key posts at the expense of “experienced” and “real cops” whose only preoccupation is fighting crime, rather than playing ANC politics.
Yet ever since that exchange between Malema and Mkhwanazi, the evidence presented between both the ad hoc committee and the Madlanga Commission overwhelmingly implicates senior cops and top government officials who cannot, by any stretch of imagination, be accused of being “cadre deployees”.
From Gen Shadrack Sibiya all the way down to Sgt Fannie Nkosi, from suspended Ekurhuleni police chief Julius Mkhwanazi to Wiandre Pretorious – the now late former police reservist alleged to have played a hand in the killing of “Witness D” – or alleged trigger-man Matipandile Sotheni and whole lot of others implicated – we are dealing with “career cops”.
The crisis in the police, as almost everywhere in government, is obviously far greater than the ANC’s “cadre deployment” policy.
This is neither meant to argue that “cadre deployment” hasn’t come with its set of problems for the system of governance in the public sector, nor to deny that the ANC and its members have not been at the forefront of the corruption that have essentially collapsed key government and constitutional structures.
How can anyone even try to deny that when no less than the ANC leader himself, President Cyril Ramaphosa, once famously declared his party “the No. 1 accused” in corruption?
However, this is meant as a cautionary tale – a reminder that corruption and crime know no political party address, that graft and greed wear no exclusive political party colours.
If this reality is ignored, citizens may devote their efforts in kicking one group of crooks out of office only to replace them with another.
Although still untested in a court of law, some of the evidence and testimony that emerged during Nkosi’s appearance before Madlanga Commission last week suggests that, at least in the Tshwane municipalities, the corrupt sometimes work in cahoots regardless of their EFF, ANC or ActionSA allegiances.
There is every reason to believe that these kinds of corrupt arrangements are replicated in many other parts of the country – especially in those municipalities and provinces where governance is through coalitions.
Hence the need to be vigilant and to be suspicious of all those who seek or hold public office, regardless of party colours and history.
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