ANC accuses Masemola of defying Mchunu on crime intelligence hiring freeze

The ANC has told Parliament’s ad hoc committee on allegations of criminality within the South African Police Service that suspended National Police Commissioner General Fanie Masemola failed to uphold his constitutional duty. The party’s complaint turns on a hiring freeze in Crime Intelligence, which it says Masemola implemented on the instruction of Police Minister Senzo Mchunu while Mchunu is on special leave.

As SABC News reported on 24 September, the submission is one of the party’s contributions to the committee, which is still deliberating on its draft report.

The committee is an ad hoc structure, meaning it was set up for a specific task and will dissolve once that task is done. Its job is to examine allegations of criminality inside the police service and to produce a report for the National Assembly. That report is not yet final, so nothing in it carries the force of a finding by Parliament. Submissions made to it are exactly that, submissions, and the ANC’s is one of them.

Crime Intelligence is the division of the SAPS that gathers, analyses and acts on information about serious and organised crime, including syndicates, extortion networks and cash-in-transit robberies. Its appointments are not routine administrative matters. A post left vacant in that division is a post not filled by an analyst, a handler or a commander, and the work that post would have done does not happen elsewhere.

The national commissioner is the accounting officer of the SAPS. The post is established under Section 207 of the Constitution, which places the control and management of the police service under the national commissioner. The same section provides for a provincial commissioner to be appointed by the national commissioner, subject to the law, and for the minister to exercise civilian oversight. The dividing line between a ministerial instruction and an operational decision is the substance of the ANC’s complaint.

The party’s position, as put to the committee, is that a directive from a minister on special leave should not have been carried out by the commissioner. Special leave is a formal arrangement. It is not the same as holding the office, and it is not the same as being removed from it.

Masemola is described in the submission as suspended. A suspension from office is not a finding of wrongdoing. It is a holding position while a process runs.

The committee’s draft report is the next document that matters. Until it is adopted, the ANC’s submission sits alongside whatever else members have placed before the committee, and the committee has not yet said what it makes of any of it.

For a reader outside Pretoria, the practical question is what a freeze on Crime Intelligence appointments does to the ground. The SAPS publishes annual crime statistics, and the categories that Crime Intelligence is meant to disrupt, such as extortion at construction sites and armed robbery of cash vans, are the ones that show up in those numbers. A hiring moratorium does not appear in the statistics at all. It shows up later, in the cases that are not made.

That is the context a South African reader brings to this story and which a short broadcast item cannot carry. The dispute here is not about whether crime intelligence matters. It is about who gets to decide who works in it, and whether a commissioner can be directed by a minister who is not currently in the office.

The ANC’s submission does not on its own establish that the instruction was unlawful, and the committee has not said so. It establishes what the governing party has put on the record. Masemola, Mchunu and the SAPS have not responded to the submission in the material available.

Source: SABC News, Crime intelligence | ANC slams Masemola for agreeing to jobs freeze.