Retired police brigadier Jap Burger, who investigated malfeasance at Eskom, has slammed the police’s approach to investigating corruption at the power utility, saying investigators were focusing on low-level criminals while avoiding dealing with kingpins operating behind the scenes.
According to Burger, Eskom is functioning in “a swamp of organised crime”, especially in Mpumalanga, but South Africa’s policing models and approaches do not encompass a more risk-based and comprehensive assessment.
Burger is the police representative who engaged former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter on the corruption, criminal activity and maladministration taking place at the power utility.
After three no-shows before parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa), Burger finally appeared on Wednesday after he was subpoenaed by parliament to avail himself.
Burger told the committee that considering the magnitude of the crisis at Eskom, including how power outages were affecting the whole country, it should be dealt with as a national security matter, but as things stood the crisis was being addressed from “an incident, or docket, perspective”.
He said the National Security Council should be leading the efforts to fight corruption in the power utility but had been silent on this.
The council is chaired by the president and comprises ministers in the security cluster in the main. It is responsible for ensuring the national security and for the approval of the national security strategy, the national intelligence estimate and national intelligence priorities and the co-ordination of the work of the security services and law enforcement agencies, among other things.
“We go after runners and catch a guy with a sack of stolen coal over his shoulder. In essence we have been keeping ourselves busy at that level, which is the general detective level, according to me. We don’t move up to the orchestrators and the kingpins behind them.”
Burger said the way the organisation (police force) was forced to function was to push everything down to the docket level, the transaction level, the incident level and not into the organised crime space.
“To me that is of extreme importance. People can come here, quote thousands of cases they investigate, but are they addressing the problem? I can say they are not,” he said.
Burger retired in June after 40 years in the police, 24 investigating corruption. This is the experience that makes him confident to question the police’s approach.
“They are avoiding it and are trying to move down to a transactional level and individualised dockets. We are not going to win the fight against corruption that way.”
Burger confirmed having raised the police’s approach with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s national security adviser, Dr Sydney Mufamadi, and suggesting that the government should invoke the National Security Council to guide the teams that are probing crimes about the entity. This was because government departments were not functioning as a collective, he said.
“What is difficult in terms of the current approach is that DGs don't trust each other. There is no body that is facilitating what each partner should be doing and where.”
But Mufamadi did not buy in to the suggestion, said Burger.
Burger apologised for his reluctance to appear before Scopa, saying it had nothing to do with arrogance. “It wasn’t from a position of arrogance, but it was from a position of, I’m working from a contaminated space. Even if you look at the address by the national commissioner, he misrepresented me and that’s why I wrote a letter to the speaker.”
He rejected as a misrepresentation national police commissioner Fannie Masemola’s assertion in June that Burger didn’t appear before the committee because he was afraid.
“That was a misrepresentation,” said Burger.
He said he had been concerned about the protection of witnesses and whistle-blowers, among other things.
“It was not to obscure what is going on but rather the obligation to deal with it in a sensitive matter, as a national security matter,” he said about his letter to National Assembly speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula in which he questioned Scopa’s role in dealing with security matters at Eskom.
“There are ongoing investigations and ongoing security concerns, which is why the other committees, like the joint standing committee on intelligence, should be engaged.
“Because, to put it bluntly, the processes of government are not working. The oversight mechanisms are not working.”
