EDITORIAL | You know what’s crazy? Cele’s idea of justice

Even when his violent instincts were limited to KwaZulu-Natal, death tended to follow Bheki Cele around.

At the end of his five years as the MEC overseeing safety and security, a period in which he wasn’t shy about sharing his view that police should always shoot before being shot, 258 people died in the custody of KZN police in just a year.

This must have impressed SA’s new president, though, because when Jacob Zuma appointed him as police commissioner in July 2009 he said Cele had “distinguished himself in a number of areas”. 

Cele had hardly warmed his seat at police HQ before he was calling for a change in the law to make it easier for police to open fire on people. And so began three years in which he crisscrossed the country visiting the homes of murdered police officers and the families of people shot by police.

Cele's idea of justice must feel completely hollow to a family robbed of a husband, father and breadwinner.

His travels ended rather abruptly when Zuma was forced to act on findings by then-public protector Thuli Madonsela that Cele was among those ultimately responsible for “fatally flawed” property leases.

But in 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa made Cele police minister, meaning the gunslinger was at the helm when one of the world’s toughest Covid-19 lockdowns was introduced.

In just more than a month, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate was dealing with 49 cases of police brutality linked to the lockdown, and Cele swaggered around the country surrounded by heavily armed officers and breathing fire and brimstone at anyone he perceived as being out of line.

All of this brings us to Wednesday, when a highly educated father of four, Mthokozisi Ntumba, stumbled into a student fees protest in Johannesburg being “policed” by Cele’s stormtroopers.

A rubber bullet fired by a public order policeman killed the 35-year-old public servant, something Cele described on Thursday as “a very sad situation to look at ... somebody just went crazy”.

This was after the minister had made another of his death-knock visits, this time to Ntumba’s family at home in Kempton Park, where he said “justice would prevail”.

Cele’s idea of justice must feel completely hollow to a family robbed of a husband, father and breadwinner. After all, public order police are so badly trained that their presence at any demonstration is a virtual guarantee of violence and bloodshed.

Perhaps this is no surprise. The likes of Cele long ago turned their backs on the notion of police keeping the peace. The minister’s idea of justice – expressed so often down the years and impossible for him to deny – has violence at its very core.

It’s probably easier that way, when the politicisation of policing along ANC factional lines absorbs so much energy and even draws in the national commissioner, the head of crime intelligence and many other key individuals.

All these officers would be far better employed reinforcing the basics of crime prevention and detection, such as processing DNA samples and cataloguing evidence – two activities Cele has allowed to come to a complete standstill.

Somebody did go crazy on Wednesday, but they didn’t do it in isolation. The individual who fired the rubber bullet that killed Ntumba, and the others around him, have absorbed the culture of “shoot first, ask questions later”, which Cele has been espousing for 15 years. 

What’s really crazy is that Cele is still in his job.