A CONSTITUTIONALLY COMPLIANT POLICE SERVICE IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR ENJOYMENT OF REAL FREEDOM

You savour freedom when you walk out of the prison gates. Suddenly, you are again part of the world with all of its dramas, good and bad.

Freedom for us, who struggled in the front line for liberation, was two-dimensional. First, there was that measure of personal freedom we sought. Then there was that deep yearning for freedom unconstrained by oppressive politics. Walking out of prison ignited both feelings in a very intense manner. The union with family, always proved emotional. After a few days, freedom again felt incomplete. One had to have that larger freedom without which dignity and meaning were impossible.

After my release, of necessity, I had to go underground to continue with our collective task of securing liberation. By agreement, none of us was to pass messages by directly phoning one another. That would have revealed our whereabouts. This arrangement worked satisfactorily for many months. Then, one day, quite surprisingly, one comrade breached this agreement.

I was on my way to Port Elizabeth to resolve a problem in the area. I had to fly there because the situation was urgent. As I left the airport building, the Special Branch officer we called “suitcase” was waiting for me. They had listened in to the call and anticipated my arrival. The security branch took me into custody one more time.

I was directed into the front seat of a police van. I sat in the middle. The van drove off. We were not going to any destination in Port Elizabeth. We were headed elsewhere.

Where we were going, however, I did not know. Through the deepening night, we travelled in that police van. I sat between two security branch officials as the police vehicle left PE and moved north. I was full of apprehension. They said nothing whatsoever to me and shared no information. It was eerie. In deathly silence, we drove through the long night. The darkness and the evil that the apartheid regime perpetrated against political prisoners both combined to make me fear the worst. I expected the vehicle to stop at some isolated place where I was to face the end.  In such circumstances, one’s fears are more for one’s family than for oneself. One accepts the inevitability of death with a strange calmness and resignation. If neither fight nor flight can help, one has to stare death in the face with all the equanimity one can summon.

So, on and on we drove in that unrelieved deathly silence. Then, as the early streaks of light began to overcome the darkness, a faint sense of hope also dawned in my breast as well. We passed several Free State towns I knew so well and as we did so, I understood then that we were heading for Johannesburg. All thoughts of an extrajudicial killing now left me. I knew then that it was going to be further interrogation all over again and more time in prison and in court.

I recount those feelings because they have a bearing on policing in our country. We did not formulate section 205(3) of the Constitution on someone else’s advice. We did it from our collective experience as political prisoners. This section states: “the objects of the police service are to prevent, combat and investigate crime, to maintain public order, to protect and secure the Republic and their property, and to uphold and enforce the law”.

A police service is fundamentally different from a police force. The attempts over the last seven years to morph the police service into a paramilitary force inevitably led to many incidents of police brutality and finally to the Marikana massacre. In the process, the police have lost the trust of communities. Worse still, police are unable to handle the pressures of their jobs and police officers continue to kill their spouses and themselves. Furthermore, criminals are killing police officers at regular frequency.

Police brutality is a reality once again. It is therefore not surprising that SAPS is facing civil claims totalling a massive R9.5-billion. This is the price for veering away from the Constitution.

When we approved our new constitution nearly two decades ago, we placed a high premium on police training, integrity and accountability. We wanted a police service that would work smarter and more effectively. More importantly, we wanted South Africans to have a new mind-set towards the police who were going to offer them an essential service. We wanted all law-abiding citizens to work with the police in a cooperative manner. Unfortunately, too many police officials, some at the highest level started to collude actively with gangsters and criminals. People started to see through this and that repelled them.

Many police officials also lacked competence. They bungled cases and had no rapport with the people they served. Many acted in a brutal and aggressive manner. People started once again to have a very negative view of the police.

We also have the worst possible Minister of Police that our democracy has ever had. Nathi Nhleko whitewashed the massive Nkandla expenditure and fully exempted President Zuma from paying anything at all. Furthermore, he appointed Berning Ntlemeza as head of the Hawks and allowed him to retain Nomgcobo Jiba as his deputy. Both have been severely criticised by judges for their conduct and lack of integrity. We all know that President Zuma needs all the protection he can get against prosecution and the Minister is playing along as a fawning poodle.

Meanwhile, policing in South Africa is in dire straits. Crime is soaring and violence is escalating. The statistics that the Minister revealed shocked the nation. Contact crime and murder remain stubbornly high. He thinks there is a good story somewhere there. We must disabuse him of that thought.

We also heard of a proliferation of unlicensed guns, of criminals slipping into South Africa undetected and remaining undocumented; and of gangs wreaking havoc without let-up. No one in South Africa is hallucinating that the police can solve the problem alone. The truth is that the Minister is clueless.

Chapter 12 of the National Development Plan lays out what the government needs to do to create safer communities. In our view, if the townships are fixed, contact crime will decline. He must implement Chapter 12 of the NDP. So must the government of the Western Cape.

The makers of our Constitution carefully thought out what had to go into it. They envisaged a new South Africa where rule of law would apply in an exemplary manner and where all would be equal before the law. President Mandela therefore subjected himself to these prescripts in order to give the lead. In Switzerland, for example, we know that it is a great societal virtue for everyone to uphold the law. The result is that Switzerland is relatively free of crime and is a very prosperous country. Most crimes committed in Switzerland involve foreign nationals.

If our constitution prevailed and the importance of law and order was deeply rooted in society and passed from generation to generation, societal pressure will combine with effective policing to keep crime under control. Regrettably, if the President himself is seeking by every means to run from the law with the help of his cronies in parliament and in the cabinet, policing will inevitably fail as is now evident. Which country in the world will respect a President who faces hundreds of possible charges and pulls every trick in the book to dodge his day in court?

On that lonely night in the police van, I thought about real freedom that comes with all the bells and whistles. I wanted that so much for our country. I wanted everything to work differently in the new democratic order. We could have had that if only we continued to honour the Constitution and kept walking in Mandela’s footsteps.

The Zuma administration, unfortunately, has imperilled our economy as well as our personal safety by the way in which it has handled policing.

If you had ever been deprived of freedom, if you had ever felt that you were minutes away from being shot and dumped somewhere in the veld, if you had ever felt that the noose was being prepared for you at the end of the trial, you too would want to see a police service in place in our democratic South Africa that genuinely served the nation. You too would have wanted to see a police service that was competent, constitutionally aware, and professional.

I ask myself repeatedly why we had regressed so much in the last few years after all that we had been through. A service is generally thought of as a government agency meeting an important public need. That is how we should have been thinking of the police. We should not be entertaining any fear or distrust of the police. We should have had every desire to cooperate with the police.

The tragedy is that we have the National Development Plan but no will to implement what it spells out in Chapter 12. We need to create safer communities in our townships. We need to make society cohere. Every community that is secure and can sustain itself becomes a building block in creating a secure society.

We know that this government will not rise to the challenge. Therefore, we will have to rely on citizen activism to compel the ruling party to heed the Constitution, the numerous judgments of our courts and the findings of the Farlam Commission to remodel the present police “force” into a constitutionally compliant police service. We will have to compel government to implement the recommendations of Chapter 12 of the Constitution. If we take hands and achieve this turnaround, our own safety and that of our children will come one-step closer to realisation.

I trust that we will have considerable agreement on this issue and that you will accept that this call for action is free of any political agenda.

Otherwise, the nightmare of that journey from Port Elizabeth on that dark night in that fearful time will return to haunt us once again.

A constitutionally compliant police service is essential to our enjoyment of real freedom which encompasses a freedom from fear.

Issued by COPE President Mosiuoa Lekota, 2 October 2015