Getting rid of Police Minister Bheki Cele won’t solve crime problem

The calls for Police Minister Bheki Cele to step down are barking up the wrong tree, say experts, because the soaring crime rate in South Africa cannot be reduced, or tackled, by merely removing a minister from his position.

Opposition parties the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), Democratic Alliance (DA) and the National Freedom Party (NFP), together with lobby group Action Society, have called on Cele to resign because policing under his leadership has “collapsed”.

However, criminologist Dr Guy Lamb said while there had been a police leadership crisis for a number of years before the appointment of the new national police commissioner – the most important position when it came to policing – Lieutenant-General Sehlahle Fannie Masemola’s appointment had stabilised policing “quite a bit”.

“There still are challenges leadership needs to address, but it’s certainly improved,” he said. “We have low levels of trust in the police and very low levels of police professionalism in many areas – and this needs to be addressed.

Institutional change

“People tend to criticise the minister, but his job is to provide political oversight and he’s almost like an easy target because he’s a charismatic person and makes controversial statements.

“If you were to remove the minister, not much would change in terms of policing. A lot of institutional change needs to happen.”

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Lamb said a number of government departments, which were not necessarily part of the crime prevention approach, did not necessarily prioritise crime prevention and strengthening the criminal justice system, even though they also played a major role.

“We’ve got extensive policies in the country to deal with policing and crime; we’ve got White Papers on policing, White Papers on safety and security, crime prevention strategies,” he added. “We have got femicide and gender-based violence prevention strategies, numerous strategies – maybe too many.”

The director of the What Works to Prevent Violence Global Programme, Prof Rachel Jewkes, agreed with Lamb and said the problem did not lie in a lack of policies, but in the lack of systems and the implementation of those policies.

“We have a situation where the people who are involved in investigating and driving our cases are so often too inexperienced, too poorly supervised and they lack fundamental resources for what I would call ridiculous reasons.

“Across our country, there are so many police stations, but they lack vehicles to investigate cases because vehicles are sitting awaiting very basic repairs.”

She said police should play a proactive role in trying to protect the community and while it was obviously not their role on their own, they should be forced to use their role to enforce legislation which would be protective.

Bheki Cele

Meanwhile, retired Major-General Chris Botha, who was in charge of research and curriculum development in the SA Police Service, said it was time for Cele to resign and step aside for someone who understood policing in a constitutional democracy.

“We are a constitutional democracy under the rule of law, yet we have a police minister who displays in the public domain a total lack of emotional and spiritual intelligence,” he said.

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“We need to change the way we look at policing in SA. Do people realise we are still recruiting young people, literally from school benches, from rural areas with poor socioeconomic backgrounds, just like I was recruited 50 years ago?”

Botha said the country needed a professional police minister who firstly had the academic qualifications to understand a constitutional state under the rule of law and also be able to maintain relations inside society, just like other professions, such as the medical and legal profession.

“In old Afrikaans, it’s simply not skop, skiet en donder any more. You have to do something different,” he said. “So if we want to be professional, we need our police people to be suitably qualified.”