Police Minister Nhleko bends over backwards to keep Ntlemeza employed

Police Minister Nkosinathi Nhleko will be applying to the North Gauteng High Court for leave to appeal the removal of disgraced ex-head of Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks) Lieutenant-General Mthandazo Ntlemeza.

“The Minister of Police Nkosinathi Nhleko will be appealing the decision of the North Gauteng High Court to have the appointment of General Berning Ntlemeza set aside as the head of the Directorate for Priority Crimes Investigation, commonly known as the Hawks,” said Nhleko’s spokesperson Sandile Ngidi yesterday.

“Minister Nhleko will be filing court papers on Monday. The appeal process will effectively suspend the current court order and allow General Ntlemeza to stay in his job until the matter is heard and adjudicated as per the appeal.”

While the rest of the country was reeling in shock at the news of the unprecedented attack on the office of the Chief Justice, Ntlemeza spent his Sunday being prayed for by the Incredible Happenings Ministries self-proclaimed “prophet”, Paseka “Mboro” Motsoeneng.

He prayed for divine intervention in the appeals process Ntlemeza was going through – and for journalists whom Motsoeneng alleged stole his car as well as those with children with drug problems they never wrote about.

“I know you are a strong leader, you are unshakable, you are unmovable, you are incredible, you are happening, you are unbreakable, because you are also a man of faith,” Motsoeneng told Ntlemeza, adding the country believed in him.

Not quite, said Ntlemeza’s nemesis, forensic consultant Paul O’Sullivan.

“If you try to go back to your old job, I will stop it. We will stop it. Me and 40 million others, in the so-called popular (Arab Spring) revolt that your unlawfully appointed debt-ridden, corrupt Gauteng Hawks head dreamt up,” O’Sullivan wrote in an e-mail to Ntlemeza on Saturday. “You have now been officially declared unfit for any public position.”

Ntlemeza had always been unfit for office, and the sooner he was ‘neutralised’ the better, O’Sullivan told The Citizen.

“No amount of divine intervention will save him. He, along with many other hand-picked people have effectively ‘captured’ the criminal justice system, to save one man from justice.”

“Their games are finally being exposed and President Jacob Zuma will have single-handedly destroyed a once-great liberation movement.”

On Friday a full bench of the North Gauteng High excoriated Ntlemeza, saying previous judicial pronouncements “constitute direct evidence that Major General Ntlemeza lacks the requisite honesty, integrity and conscientiousness to occupy the position of any public office, not to mention an office as important as that of the national head of the DPCI, where independence, honesty and integrity are paramount qualities”.

“Until such findings are appealed against successfully they shall remain as a lapidary against Lieutenant General Ntlemeza,” the court found before setting Nhleko’s appointment of Ntlemeza aside.

Last year an investigation by The Citizen found Ntlemeza had been appointed without a competency test or criminal record check, and there was no investigation of whether he had any departmental disciplinary cases outstanding.

It was under these conditions that Minister Nkosinathi Nhleko appointed Ntlemeza to the top job of the SA Police Service’s elite crime-fighting unit with a salary of R1.6 million a year.

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