MAKHUDU SEFARA | When ‘effective’ becomes excessive: a cautionary tale from Sibiya’s fall

It’s hard to tell whether deputy national police commissioner Shadrack Sibiya knows his goose is cooked or believes the Madlanga inquiry commissioners are needlessly putting him through his paces.

Though he is due to conclude cross-examination on Monday, his imminent — some will say overdue — fall from grace offers a lesson for many officers, including bureaucrats outside the SAPS.

There was palpable frustration on his part when, on Friday, he cried out, “I feel punished for being effective … for wanting to get things done.” This followed a difficult day on the stand, with commissioners quizzing him on what they saw as his unbecoming enthusiasm in the disbandment of the political killings task team (PKTT). They posited that he had veered beyond the mandate. His pushback was that they were confusing his desire for results with a frolic of his own.

History may help us better understand this moment. In 2015, Sibiya, then head of the Hawks in Gauteng, was dismissed from the SAPS following claims he had participated in the illegal rendition of Zimbabwean nationals — a matter in which Anwa Dramat and Robert McBride were also implicated. The labour court later found his dismissal procedurally and substantively unfair and ordered his reinstatement, in a case the SAPS did not defend.

This week, Sibiya complained that the people who ran the SAPS then — and effectively threw him out — are now his tormentors, in the form of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP). He notes that Nathi Nhleko, now the MKP’s national chair, was police minister at the time. Many will remember Nhleko as the comical fellow who was sweating almost like Ekurhuleni’s famous son Julius Mkhwanazi while explaining that former president Jacob Zuma’s very big swimming pool was in fact a “fire pool”.

Why would Sibiya risk failing to read the room twice? He did — and this is the sad part — what normal civil servants do: they bow to authority

The point, one might speculate, is that Sibiya may have felt then that his attempts to operate “normally” in a politically charged police force led him nowhere. Those who played the political game, some now in the MKP, drove him out. Political players such as Berning Ntlemeza, who replaced Dramat as head of the Hawks in 2014, were promoted while he and others watched.

Ten years later, Sibiya perhaps believed that once beaten was twice shy. Why would he not learn from his own past pain? He was not going to allow political upstarts to outwit him again. He was going to get his hands dirty in the politics of the SAPS. He moved himself closer to political power. He became the go-to guy, even for deputy police minister Cassel Mathale, who reportedly required favours. He made himself useful to the political overlords. When police minister Senzo Mchunu expressed concerns and later disestablished the PKTT through a December 31 directive, Sibiya wanted to prove to his political boss that he was “effective” — the guy who could “get things done”.

There may well have been a confluence of interests: a desire to please others, such as Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, and a desire to please his political head.

What emerges is a career policeman who was tired of playing second fiddle to national police commissioner Fannie Masemola, who was seeing that Masemola was approaching retirement, and, importantly, did not want to miss a possible promotion by failing to meet what he believed the moment required. He has done this before. He slept on the job when — at the height of the Zuma administration — Nhleko promoted amenable officers who helped him manage the political scandals of the time. Outside the police, civil servants who played along with politicians, such as Hlaudi Motsoeneng, Siya Gama, Lucky Montana and Brian Molefe, were on the up and up, while he battled in court for reinstatement.

Sibiya either gave in or allowed his unbecoming enthusiasm to get the better of him. Now he is at the centre of a Madlanga commission storm

Why then would Sibiya risk failing to read the room twice? He did — and this is the sad part — what normal civil servants do: they bow to authority. They’re not trying to be heroes. They look at the fate of those who showed courage and paid dearly — such as advocate Vusi Pikoli, who, despite political pressure, took unpopular but correct decisions and was cast out and denied further job opportunities — while the compliant, including Ntlemeza, later found by a court to be dishonest, were rewarded with work contracts. More recently, officials observing the fate of whistleblower Babita Deokaran may well choose not to confront authority.

In this context, Sibiya either gave in or allowed his unbecoming enthusiasm to get the better of him. Now he is at the centre of a Madlanga commission storm, bellowing, “I feel punished for being effective … for wanting to get things done.” Except that, this time, he may have been getting the wrong things done.

The lesson he missed is that his reinstatement was proof the system, however slowly, still works. He also missed the fact that the MKP gang that threw him out, including Nhleko, are no longer in government.

Sibiya also didn’t appreciate that the careers of people such as Motsoeneng, Gama, Montana and Molefe illustrate how temporary gains often give way to lasting difficulty. He is now faced with his own type of difficulty before the unyielding Madlanga commissioners.

It’s possible this reading of how Sibiya landed in the soup is imperfect. Yet his journey — from being seen earlier in his career as an embodiment of ethics to now being associated with allegations of capture by criminal interests — is laden with lessons. These are lessons for the politicians who demand compliance without question, and for civil servants who aim to please political bosses without considering where that path may end.

While Sibiya’s goose may well be cooked, this remains an important teachable moment for many.