Farewell, Phiyega. You and your mishaps won’t be forgotten

Monday was Riah Phiyega’s last day as national police commissioner. Well, sort of.

There was no office party.

No nostalgic farewell speeches with loyal subordinates knuckling away a tear.

Because Phiyega has been suspended from her job for the past 20 months, she hasn’t had the schlepp of actually working. And this unintended vacation has, naturally, been on full pay.

Phiyega does, however, have some bragging rights. She is the only national commissioner since George Fivaz, a career policeman appointed in 1994, to complete the statutory five-year term.

Jackie Selebi, a political appointment by Thabo Mbeki, had his office unexpectedly truncated by a 15-year jail sentence for corruption. Bheki Cele, a political appointment by Jacob Zuma, survived barely two years before being fired after an inquiry into claims of corruption found him unfit for service.

Phiyega, too, was found to be unfit for office, following the police killing 34 miners at Marikana. The Marikana inquiry found that her evidence to the commission had been misleading.

One would know none of this from the SA Police Service (SAPS) website, which is a marvellous example of how to airbrush truths.

To start with, this history commences in 1994. Presumably this is to avoid recounting the sullying incidents dating back to the force’s actual formation in 1913, lest we start drawing embarrassing analogies with the present day.

More specifically, Selebi’s appointment is noted with the unintentionally comical observation that he marked the beginning of a “new era” . A new era, indeed, but not as was intended.

Selebi’s abrupt departure is not mentioned. Similarly, with Cele.

Phiyega’s personal Waterloo, the Battle of Marikana, is never mentioned. Nor, obviously, Farlam, the board of inquiry, or her suspension. Phiyega’s name occurs only twice. Once, to record her appointment. The second, a 2013 speech commemorating the SAPS centenary.

Her speech – which the SAPS history breathlessly describes as “inspirational” – has its own moments of unintended hilarity.

“Nothing will deter us,” boasts Phiyega just a year after Marikana, “from ensuring that our women and men in blue conduct themselves at all times in a manner which is beyond reproach … We must tackle crime within the confines of the very laws which we are constitutionally bound to uphold.”

Remarkable words from a woman who has never shown any public contrition for Marikana. For she and Marikana have become synonymous. It must surely, at some level, hurt that it is for this tragedy that she will go down in history. To be shuffled from the stage, always to be remembered as the one who presided over a police massacre under an ANC government must be an emotional burden.

On the other hand, perhaps this insouciance is no act. Phiyega was an ANC deployee. Politicians are not renowned for being finely attuned to feelings of shame and remorse.

As she put it in her speech: “We can never change history. In fact, we must carefully preserve history so that we can celebrate the fact that injustices of the past have been rectified.”

Trust us, Riah, South Africa will remember.

William Saunderson-Meyer.