Ryland Fisher
Growing up on the Cape Flats about half a century ago, we had many names for policemen, most of them derogatory. We would sometimes call them “boere”, which could be translated from Afrikaans into farmers, but which means white in this context. We would also call them “varke” or pigs. Sometimes we would call them “mapuza” which I believe is a Xhosa slang word.
But there was one word which we often used to refer to the good policemen who one would encounter from time to time. The word was “diener”, which roughly translates from Afrikaans into “servant” or “server”.
If one has to believe all the negative reporting around police activities recently, including large-scale corruption, then it appears that the dieners have lost out and the mapuzas, boere and varke have taken over the running of the police force.
How else does one explain the details that have come to the fore around the assassination of gang investigator Lieutenant-Colonel Charl Kinnear, who was gunned down in the driveway of his Bishop Lavis home in broad daylight two weeks ago?
While the investigations are still continued, there are early and eerie indications that elements in the police force might have been involved. A suspect has been arrested and has been charged with murder, but more arrests are imminent, if police sources are to be believed.
One hopes that the bluster displayed by police minister Bheki Cele at Kinnear’s funeral last Saturday will lead to some positive action. Cele undertook to get rid of rotten apples in the police services. But this is something that we have heard before, not only from Cele but also his predecessors.
How else does one explain the police’s seeming inability to stop the persistent gang violence on the Cape Flats and elsewhere that has cost thousands of lives over the years? It seems like the more honourable policemen such as Lt Col Kinnear do to counter gang violence, the more their work is undermined by rotten policemen who derive benefit from the ill-gotten gains of gangs.
How else does one explain the continued corruption at all levels of the police? According to Corruption Watch, almost 10 percent of their whistleblower reports last year related to the police, making it the biggest sinner in the public service as far as corruption is concerned.
Corruption Watch’s executive director David Lewis believes, “If we are to tackle corruption, and many other social ills like gender-based violence it is necessary that there be trust in the police”.
Since South Africa became a democracy more than 26 years ago, we have seen the police services embroiled in one controversy after the other. It has been difficult to keep up, with successive national police commissioners being disgraced, and incidents like the arrest of 42 people, including 22 police officers, in Pretoria a few days ago for allegedly looting R85 million of state funds.
Sometimes one would wonder aloud about when the police became so corrupt and lost the trust of the public. The truth is that it is not a phenomenon of the past two or three decades. It is something that has been going on for years.
The relationship that most people in South Africa had with the police during the days of apartheid was different because the police were perceived to be propping up the apartheid mechanisms. They were often in the frontline of the defence of apartheid, whether it was through beating up protesters or arresting and sometimes killing opponents of apartheid. It was almost natural that we would have an adversarial relationship with the police and that we would not trust them.
Like so many other institutions of government, we had high hopes that post-apartheid police would be different. We were supposed to trust them when we reported crimes, that they would investigate, and that they would protect us.
We had hoped that the first description that would come to mind when thinking or talking about the police in post-apartheid South Africa would be “diener” because they would truly have become servants of the people.
Instead, we have seen how confidence in the police have been eroded over the years.
There are some people who argue that they reason police are so easily corruptible is because they earn so little, making it easier for them to fall to the temptation of dirty money offered to them by criminals.
But it is much more than that. Being a policeman is supposed to be about more than money. It is supposed to be about service. It’s about being a “diener”. There are many other professions where the money is little, but the people still practise their craft to the best of their ability. Money can solve some things, but not everything.
There are many things that will need to happen to change the culture in the police force to one where service becomes the most important thing. One of it is to change the mindset of policemen from the top to the bottom.
We will never be able to change the mindset of the majority of policemen if this change does not come from the top. If the leadership is perceived to be corrupt, then what’s to stop the rank and file from following suit? Unless we have urgent changes in the police services, we will never be able to deal with the rampant crime in our society.
One can only hope that some day soon most policemen will live up to the name “diener” and will truly be servants of the people.
(Written as a blog for this website on Tuesday, 6 October 2020)
