Wednesday had been set down at the last August appearance as the date for a pre-trial conference, but a proliferation of “he said, she said” — as Mewalal described the to-and-fro about who was responsible for the latest delay — took up the entire sitting. 

Former state prosecutor Kuveshni Pillay, who is acting as defence advocate for accused Rajen Saunders, had suggested 1 November as the new pre-trial date, but Mewalal responded sharply that it would be “unconscionable” to set the matter down “two months from now”. 

Prior to this, Pillay had told the magistrate that “defence is not ready to set the matter down for pre-trial” and that there had been “unreasonable delays” by the state — a reference to the wait Pillay had experienced for particulars — which she said prejudiced her client.

There was a delay, said Mewalal, but it was not unreasonable, given the court had not set a timeframe for the furnishing of the particulars. She said there were also no grounds for a section 342A enquiry (an investigation into the delays) “at this time”.  

The delays were “déjà vu”, Mewalal said.

“The goalposts always seem to be changing, for whatever reasons,” she said, adding however that there had been progress in the matter, although it was “small”.

“I am anxious to set the trial date. It has been far too long on the court roll. All the matters discussed here have been discussed before,” said Mewalal.

While this was playing out, family and friends of the accused — all out on R3 000 bail — and the victim, were seated in the gallery, also visibly frustrated.

The accused, barring number 15 Eric Carson, who was undergoing knee-replacement surgery, stood casually in the dock and overflowed behind the dock, none appearing particularly anxious. They managed to laugh or smile when Carson’s attorney, Christo van Schalkwyk, cracked a joke.

Mewalal said it would not be “prudent” for the court to continue with Carson not present.

Naidoo’s family has been searching for answers since his father, Timothy, was told by a police captain that Regan died after “choking on a pie” while being questioned at the Chatsworth police station six years ago.

Naidoo was taken in for questioning after alleged hitman Xolani Zunga was shot dead by Chatsworth resident Fardeem Carim, just days before Naidoo’s death.

According to various media reports from the time, Carim witnessed Zungu kill two men. He then shot Zungu using a gun licensed to his deceased father and allegedly also took Zungu’s gun and sold it for R3 000.  

Carim was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2020.

It was allegedly the search for the firearm that led to the torture and death of Regan just days later, and the torture and attempted murder of Carim, while police were interrogating the men, and one Ahmed Dawood, regarding the whereabouts of the weapon.

In their 2021 bail conditions, the accused were ordered not to directly or indirectly contact Carim or Dawood, among other named witnesses.

The Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) has said that Naidoo, Dawood and Carim were “picked up from a Caltex Garage on Montford Drive, Chatsworth” at 10pm on 28 August, 2018, for questioning about the weapon. The officers involved in the investigation were attached to the Durban flying squad, the KwaZulu-Natal organised crime unit, the Chatsworth trio crimes unit and the Durban K9 unit.

The officers took Naidoo to his home while they searched for the gun. It was here that he was allegedly assaulted by the police officers for the first time. This, according to Timothy Naidoo, took place in front of his son’s then-pregnant wife.

The three men were then taken to Chatsworth police station for the questioning to continue. According to Ipid’s investigation, Naidoo had “collapsed at the station” by 3am on 29 August.

It remains unclear how long Naidoo was at the police station while in this state. Ipid said he was eventually transported to RK Khan Hospital, about one kilometre away, in a police vehicle, and declared dead.

According to a post mortem examination report conducted by a specialist forensic pathologist at the time of Naidoo’s death, which the Mail & Guardian has seen, the 32-year-old security technician died from a blunt force head injury.

Naidoo also sustained multiple fractured ribs, lung contusions and subdural haemorrhage. Two ribs were noted as being “exposed”.

He had no traces or alcohol or illegal drugs in his system, as per a blood toxicology analysis.

The pre-trial conference was eventually scheduled for 18 October.

If South Africa wanted a strong judiciary, priority should be given to ensure that those responsible for appointing judges were “the right people to do so”, he said on Tuesday during a webinar hosted by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE).

The centre released its fourth report in a series on priorities for South Africa’s new government, on how the judiciary could be strengthened.  

Selecting judges to serve in South Africa’s courts and to investigate complaints against judges is the realm of the JSC, a body considered by many legal practitioners as being politically driven and inexperienced for the gravity of its task, meaning that some of the country’s finest legal minds are overlooked for positions.

In 2021, the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution forced a rerun of JSC interviews for constitutional court vacancies after the questioning of candidates took a political trajectory. 

Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema at the time questioned candidates about rulings they made that were not in favour of his party. Those interviews also descended into personal attacks on some candidates.

In 2022, during interviews for the chief justice position, Gauteng’s judge president, Dunstan Mlambo, was asked by Malema and advocate Dali Mpofu about “rumours” of sexual harassment. Mlambo responded to the unsubstantiated allegations, denying them, and his responses were expunged during the same sitting. No formal complaint has ever been made against the judge regarding sexual harassment.

The 23-person commission comprises National Assembly members, members of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP), members from the law fraternity and four members designated by the president. The chief justice or deputy chief justice presides over the commission.   

“I think that there is a strong case to be made for adjusting the composition of the JSC. At the moment, there are 11 political appointments, and then there are also four to be made by the president,” Nugent said on Tuesday.

“It might have been that 30 years ago that was an appropriate composition, but we’ve moved on since, and it is by no means an appropriate composition.”

Those who sat on the JSC needed to be qualified to do so, he said. “They must be people of integrity who will do a proper inquiry into the fitness of a judge, or of a person to be a judge.”

Members of the JSC being appointed by the National Assembly led to a situation where “any person nominated by any political party is appointed as a matter of course”, Nugent added.

“The National Assembly has its own obligation to consider people who are nominated by the political parties, to consider whether they are actually appropriately qualified to be appointed.

“Once appointed, the people who are appointed, politicians who are appointed to the judicial service commission, [should not be there] to represent their parties. They are there to make decisions in the national interest, irrespective of the views of their political parties.

“There is no place for them to be caucusing politically in their decision-making. There is no place for them to be taking instructions from their political parties as to what decisions they should make. They ought to be making their decisions independently, not as politicians, but as representatives of the country.”

Prior to Nugent, the CDE’s Ann Bernstein said weak judges could be a threat to the rule of law, and that the country’s judiciary was undermined by an executive that underfunded the courts.

“A modern economy needs skilled judges. Our Constitution is a complex document. Our economy is sophisticated, involving contestation over complicated contracts, rights and responsibilities, both locally and internationally,” Bernstein said.

“Learned and skilled judges are needed to make judgments on these complex rules and relationships. We are a country grappling with state capture, with industrial scale corruption, and we need judges of experience and considerable legal expertise.”

In this context, the process of selecting judges was extremely important, she said. “Judges, who could fairly be assumed to have the most knowledge of what is required for judicial office, are vastly outnumbered [on the JSC].”

Newly appointed Chief Justice Mandisa Maya would need to lead in reforming the commission and strengthening the judiciary if attacks on the Constitution were to be withstood, said Bernstein.

Also on the panel was Mbekezeli Benjamin, a research and advocacy officer at Judges Matter. Referring to the 2021 JSC interview debacle, he said that then chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng had failed in his leadership role.

When former chief justice Raymond Zondo took up the post after Mogoeng, he showed leadership when, prior to an October 2021 JSC sitting, he called the commissioners to a workshop and “thrashed out” how the commissioners behaved and how they should have behaved. There was a “slight improvement” after that workshop, he said.

As a constitutional body, the JSC should have proper systems, rules and procedures in place, said Benjamin, instead of “depending on whims”.

He said that for the past three years, Judges Matter had been advocating for the JSC to have written criteria that would guide how its interviews were conducted.

The commission should have a code of conduct for commissioners, he said, which would regulate who was appointed, and give guidance on the bodies that constitute the JSC.

The code of conduct should set the standards for how individuals behave as commissioners, “and if they don’t meet those standards, there should be an enforcement mechanism in the form of the power of recall”, he said.

The JSC should be able to write to the National Assembly to say that an assembly member had not behaved according to the standards that had been set, and the National Assembly should recall the commissioner.  

To the JSC’s credit, he said, it had adopted written criteria that spoke to the qualities needed to be a judge — practical experience in courts, a good work ethic and commitment to integrity, among others.

“But those criteria are not self-executing, of course, and what we are now calling for is activity that should be enforced consistently in all the interviews, and even before [the interviews],” said Benjamin. The JSC should “start playing a strategic HR function”, he said, for which Judges Matter had been advocating.

Geoff Budlender SC spoke about the JSC “simply not having the experience, skills and competence to work out who will be able to do a good job and who won’t be able to do a good job”.

More judges needed to be appointed to the JSC, he said, because they spent every day observing and assessing the performances of lawyers.

“It seems to be absurd that we should think that [judges] could play only a small role in identifying who would make the most effective judges.”

There also needed to be more pressure applied to the bodies — the president, National Assembly, professional bodies and the NCOP — who nominate members of the JSC “to ensure that they do their job properly”.

“Appointing members of the JSC is not a matter of one for my chair and one for yours, one for me, and one for you and three for the other person. It’s a very, very serious task, and we need to look for ways in which we can discipline and structure the process of the appointment of the members of the JSC, because if you have a weak JSC, you’re going to have a weak judiciary,” he said.

The role of the chairperson of the JSC also had to come under scrutiny, said Budlender, “and I’m afraid that is where we have fallen very far short in many instances over the past 30 years”.

Chairing the JSC had “become a job of just directing the traffic … when it is much more fundamental than that”, he said.

“It’s the job of the chairperson to lead, to ensure that a properly focused and properly disciplined interview takes place. It’s the job of the chairperson to prevent irrelevant and improper questions being asked, to prevent candidates being ambushed.

“And it’s also the job of the chairperson to ensure that the candidates are treated with dignity and respect. It’s not a matter of showing deference to them. 

“They’re all asking for a job. They’re applying for a job. They should be willing to stand up to firm and robust questioning. But insults, political insults and grandstanding directed at candidates who are unable to answer for themselves because they are candidates, really ought not to be tolerated. We’ve had too much of that.”

While the full digital crime-fighting ambitions of the metro police are in limbo, community policing forums and residents continue to expand parallel networks of cameras at their own expense. They share the content of these with private security and, informally, with metro police and the South African Police Service (SAPS), when asked.

The control and monitoring of the city’s 519 cameras is the purview of the disaster management unit but should already have been in control of the metro police, as mandated by the city manager well over a year ago.

Durban Metro Police Commissioner Sibonelo Mchunu told the Mail & Guardian that his staff were “ready” for the takeover and the cameras had been included in the metro police’s procurement plan.

On Tuesday, KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi told broadcaster eNCA that SAPS was also in talks with the city about metro police having “better control of the cameras, so that they are used for law enforcement more than disaster”. He said the number of cameras needed to be increased.

Should law enforcement take charge of the CCTV network, Mkhwanazi said, response times to crimes would improve. He made the comments during an operation at Durban’s infamous Point area.  

At an anti-crime summit earlier this month, Mkhwanazi said for the past financial year, 40% of crimes committed in KwaZulu-Natal were in eThekwini. In 2022, former eThekwini mayor Mxolisi Kaunda put that number at 50%.  

Mchunu refused to respond to questions about why the shift had stalled, but other metro police and city sources, who are not authorised to speak to the media and so cannot be named, said having the cameras under disaster management meant actively looking for crime on the streets was “secondary” to “looking for potential disasters”.

As things stand now, said one high-ranking city employee, if a camera operator sees a crime in progress, they must alert the police, who would then have to take an affidavit from the operator. 

Should the operator have to appear in court, there is reluctance and “fear of reprisal” because the operator is not an officer and has not been trained in appearing in court and giving evidence.

Another source said disaster management staff had been “intentionally misinformed” about the changeover and “led to believe” they would lose their jobs when the metro police took charge.

“There is a lot of gossip about the changeover, which makes people run to their unions, which is also why the process has stalled,” said a metro employee who asked to remain anonymous. “Even when they are guaranteed they will still be employed by the city, they don’t trust that.”

Said another: “Managers are scared they may be demoted if moved to other departments from disaster management, so they are also stalling the process.”

But the biggest impediment to the takeover of the network, according to all the sources, was the potential for corrupt employees and managers to “feed” off the “very lucrative” tenders that accompany the CCTV cameras.

“Because the cameras are with disaster management, there is the ability to use section 36 [of the city’s supply-chain management policy, which allows deviations] for what can be [touted as] legitimate emergencies,” one said.

Section 36 allows for emergency contracts to be awarded, without going to tender, for no more than three months at a time.

Opposition parties have long exposed the municipality’s abuse of section 36.

Last year, then Democratic Alliance (DA) eThekwini deputy leader Billy Mzamo (now an MP) said the city had awarded 20 Durban Solid Waste refuse collection tenders worth R144.8 million, via section 36, in just 120 days.

The sources said that under eThekwini’s new ANC mayor Cyril Xaba there had been “no interference” in tenders “unlike before” and the hope was that he would allow authorities to “finally” root out corruption.

Mchunu told the M&G his budget could accommodate 100 trainee law enforcement officers (peace officers) to operate the cameras, who would be supervised by metro police captains. Should the operators see a crime being committed, the captains would be able to give real-time orders in the control centre and on the ground, he said.

This is in line with eThekwini’s smart policing plan, which “we are all waiting for and which will increase safety in the city”, Mchunu added.

The plan, to be implemented in phases, will cost the city R300 million and will include facial-recognition cameras, drones, dashboard cameras for vehicles, a mobile police station for rapid deployment and body cameras for metro officers.

The city’s CCTV network is a bone of contention with opposition parties and residents. In December, DA councillor Sharmaine Sewshanker said a report brought before the city’s safety, emergency and security committee, on which she sits, showed that only 14% of the municipality’s cameras were functional. 

In the same month, then mayor Kaunda embarked on a public relations exercise at the CCTV control room, where he said the city had spent R100 million to repair and upgrade the network, with the central business district taking priority. Cameras in other areas were still to be repaired and upgraded, he said.

According to a presentation made to the municipality’s security committee this month, only 319 cameras out of a total of 519 were working last month, leaving 200 offline. Of the working cameras, 272 were in the central and beachfront area, which has 290 cameras installed.

In the south of the metro, only 78 cameras were working out of a total of 111. In the north, only 21 cameras were working out of 63, and in the west, only 28 were working out of 55.

According to a report presented at the same committee meeting, most of the incidents viewed on the cameras (761) were traffic related.

But when contacted on Wednesday, the head of the city’s disaster management unit, Vincent Ngubane, disputed the numbers, saying: “I am in charge of this department, and those numbers are wrong. We have 400 cameras operational out of 519. [In the beachfront and inner-city area] we have 98 operational all the time.”

Ngubane said local businesses had been used to supply, install and commission the cameras on three-year contracts. The city spent “about R100 million a year” for maintenance and installation, he said.

Asked if he agreed that the CCTV network should be moved to the control of metro police, Ngubane said: “I don’t have a problem with that, as long as it’s a strategic decision by the city. If the cameras have to move, so be it. Someone else can take charge.”

While the foot-dragging continues, private security companies, residents, neighbourhood watches and community-policing forums are closing the gaps with automatic number-plate recognition cameras and high-definition CCTV cameras.

With these erected on private property, but often overlooking exits and entrances to public roads and areas, metro police and the SAPS often request access to footage when looking for evidence of crimes.

Durban-based NCAM, one of several local players in a massive industry, has installed 700 cameras throughout the province, the vast majority in eThekwini’s Westville area, and has almost 2 000 nationally.

According to owner Werner Hendrikse, of the 700 cameras in KwaZulu-Natal, about half were installed for private security companies and half for residents, shopping centres, churches, schools and so on.

Unlike the city’s cameras, NCAM footage is stored on cloud servers, making tampering more difficult.

“We work with metro police and SAPS and always refer them back to where the incident occurred [if they are looking for footage]. Access is strictly controlled [by our clients].”

“At present, with our fiscal position, with substantial current account and budget deficits, it is not the most opportune and favourable time for us to establish a sovereign wealth fund,” he said.

“Funding for service delivery remains under pressure, additional resources are required to improve the recruitment of key personnel such as police and teachers. We also need to increase basic maintenance for infrastructure.”

He made the statement during an oral question and answer session in parliament.

The idea of a sovereign wealth fund has long been touted, but in 2020 then finance minister Tito Mboweni said steps were finally being taken to make sure it was realised.

Ramaphosa said the government would continue to work towards the objective of a sovereign wealth fund, because it could ensure “that the national wealth of our country is effectively used to support economic and social development for years to come”.

In a supplementary question, the Democratic Alliance said it had concerns about implementation and management of the fund “especially with the proven track record of mismanagement and corruption within state owned enterprises”, and that the fund would stretch already severely burdened taxpayers.

But Ramaphosa said that if the “architecture” of the fund was well structured, “we would argue that you do not need to utilise money from the fiscus to create the sovereign wealth fund”.

Proceeds for the fund would be from government-held assets, he said, “as it flows through dividends and other processes”.

He used the example of the government-owned Public Investment Corporation (PIC), which manages government pensions among other assets, as an example that the state can be trusted with money. The funds under the PIC’s management  had surpassed R7 trillion, Ramaphosa said.

The PIC invested its money “very, very effectively” in bonds and equities and supported economic development by funding a number of business development projects, he said. 

Ramaphosa said the sovereign wealth fund would be built from state-owned enterprises and have an SOE holding company from which dividends could be drawn

“And I would like to believe that with good corporate governance processes, the money should be well managed, akin to what has been happening through the PIC.”

The money from the fund would be used for economic development, he said.

He conceded that many of the country’s SOEs were “in the doldrums”, but said processes were under way to reposition them.

“And when they are repositioned — and this will take time — we will then be able to draw dividends from those, and the dividends will start flowing into the sovereign wealth fund and building it up.”

The fund had moved beyond being a dream and wish, he said. “We are now getting into the nuts and bolts of how this sovereign wealth fund could operate.”

Despite Thulani Vilakazi’s bullish outlook, Ithala suffers from an inability to persuade South Africa’s banking oversight bodies to convert the entity into a full-blown bank, and concerns remain about its seemingly unprotected customer base.

“We are in a terrain where we are holding bank deposits, but we are no longer having the instrument that gives us cover to operate and mimic a bank,” Vilakazi told a media briefing in Durban.

“There is a cure,” he said. Either Ithala was granted a licence under the appropriate section of the Banks Act, became a mutual bank, “or an exemption must be granted”.  

“Without an exemption we require a policy intervention,” he said.

Ithala has long held ambitions to transact as a commercial bank, something an exemption notice repeatedly extended since 2001 had allowed it to do to a certain extent, meaning that, among other things, it could take deposits.

But the last exemption expired on 15 December last year, and the Prudential Authority, which regulates banks in the country, refused to grant another extension.

Absa, with which Ithala had a sponsorship agreement that allowed it access to the national payment system, also recently ended its 20-year agreement, citing issues with Ithala’s governance structures. Vilakazi has previously worked for Absa and Standard Bank groups.

In the latest blow, Ithala’s financial services provider licence was suspended by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) on Friday, effective 26 July, because it did not “meet the financial soundness requirements specified in the appropriate legislation”.

The appropriate legislation here refers to the Financial Intermediary Services (FAIS) Act, which protects financial consumers.

The suspension means Ithala is prohibited from doing any new business and any outstanding business must be transferred to an authorised financial services provider, which Vilakazi said had been “carried out”. Other requirements had also been met, he said.

Ithala can, however, continue serving existing clients.

The suspension will be lifted when specified conditions are met, with solvency being one of the most critical requirements.

Ithala is the banking arm of the Ithala Development Financing Corporation (ITFC), which is the second largest property owner in KwaZulu-Natal and is wholly owned by the provincial government.

The province’s economic development MEC, Musa Zondi, told the briefing that Ithala’s leaders had presented the “new developments” to the premier and cabinet, and that the premier would soon make an announcement.

“It is important to emphasise that this crisis is being addressed with the utmost urgency,” said Zondi, adding that the KwaZulu-Natal government was committed to “restoring Ithala’s dignity and reputation”.  

Providing background to the company, Vilakazi said Ithala was “conceived” in 2001 when a decision was made by the South African Reserve Bank to separate banking activities from developmental ones. “Hence, that was the start of Ithala today as you know it,” he said.

Since then, Ithala had been granted permission under the exemption notice to “act and behave like a bank”, he said.

As for solvency, he said that in terms of the requirements set by the FSCA, for a financial service provider to be deemed solvent, the equation used was “very simple” — current assets minus current liabilities.

But, he added: “In banking theory, no bank can meet that equation, because what happens in banking is that the assets that you finance — cars, homes etc — are financed on a long term basis. So your short term assets will never be equal to what you are financing on a long term basis.”

The SOC had been granted an unqualified audit for the past 10 years, he said, “which tells you that Ithala is financially sound”.

Ithala recorded a net loss of R51.97 million for the year ended 31 March 2022. Included in this was R9.40 million as a result of the July riots and Covid-19 related costs of R1.8 million. Sasria insurance claims of R13.7 million were expected to be received in the 2021-22 financial year to reduce the unrest losses, but only R1.8 million was received, Ithala said in its annual report.

According to the auditor general, a material loss of R4.21 million was incurred as a result of the write off of loans and advances, down from R9.2 million for 2021. The auditor general also said that “management did not implement adequate controls around supply chain management processes to prevent irregular expenditure”.  

Although it services the “unbanked and poor”, Ithala historically offered sweetheart loans to the politically connected, including since deceased Prince Sifiso Zulu, former KwaZulu-Natal premier and national health minister Zweli Mkhize, and its own managers and executives.  

According to its annual report, 85% of its clients earn a monthly income of about R5 000. Ithala services stokvels, cooperatives, taxi associations, offers personal and business banking, and insurance.

Vilakazi said the institution had been instrumental in allowing its clients to save “not for consumption, but for things that matter — education, building houses in rural areas”.

When he appeared before parliament’s finance portfolio committee in February, Vilakazi also made pleas for intervention.

He told the committee that South Africa’s Banks Act only allows for public companies to register as banks, the definition of which includes “national” state-owned companies, which excludes Ithala because it is provincially-owned.

Vilakazi sought intervention to amend the relevant legislature to remove the word “national” from the definition, and asked that this be fast tracked through a Members Bill, which was left with the sixth administration.

He also asked the treasury to grant the exemption, and had asked the finance minister to intervene on Ithala’s behalf. But as a treasury representative told the committee, the minister does not have the authority to do so.

At the same committee meeting, then KwaZulu-Natal economic development MEC Siboniso Duma said the committee should not listen to “doomsayers”, because Ithala was performing well.

Infrastructure Development Finance Company chief executive Pearl Bengu said at the same committee meeting that the IDFC did not rely on the government for funding. She said Ithala SOC would “always” be sound because it was a subsidiary of the “profitable” IDFC.

In a meeting of the KwaZulu-Natal legislature’s standing committee on public accounts in April last year, then Scopa chairperson Maggie Govender said there had been a decline in customer deposits at Ithala and that “uncertainty around how long it will continue as a going concern” was a worry.

Ithala first applied for authorisation to establish itself as a bank in 2016, but this was declined “because of insufficient capital and lack of requisite banking skills and systems”. It applied again in June 2023, but was also declined.

The FSCA said in its statement that Ithala had made an application to the Financial Services Tribunal for the reconsideration of the FSCA’s decision “and simultaneously applied for the interim suspension of the decision pending the outcome of the reconsideration application”. 

The tribunal dismissed the interim application on 22 August, and a hearing date for the reconsideration application before the tribunal is yet to be determined.

Policing is currently structured at a national level, meaning “we are centralised in terms of constraint”, Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi told the Mail & Guardian during an interview. “It is an organisational challenge that we have at national level that we are trying to unlock.”

Mkhwanazi, who acted as national police commissioner for eight months in 2011/12, said that any way in which police could be capacitated and investigations increased was welcome. But he questioned whether empowering metro police with what would be limited investigative authority was the best response. 

Mkhwanazi’s appeal comes amid Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis’s repeated calls for the “decentralisation and devolution of specified policing functions to the City of Cape Town”.  

Hill-Lewis believes this can be achieved by amendments to the South African Police Service (SAPS) Act. He said he had tried to have discussions with former police minister Bheki Cele about the matter, but did not receive any formal response to repeated correspondence.  

Cele, however, said in public statements that what Hill-Lewis was seeking would require “constitutional amendments”, but the mayor has argued otherwise.

Devolution of policing

Calls for the devolution of policing powers in the Western Cape are not new, with then premier Helen Zille pushing for such and ramping up calls after the outcomes of the Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry into policing in that township.

Premier Alan Winde has done the same. For the 2019 elections, the Democratic Alliance (DA) erected posters touting “A provincial police service for you”.

The Law Enforcement Advancement Plan (LEAP) was initiated in the City of Cape Town in 2019 — essentially peace officers with limited powers compared with the SAPS and metro police — who assist police in high crime areas and, according to the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), the formation of which was in line with a 2018 Government Gazette.  

Late in 2022, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi announced the establishment of his own crime prevention wardens, known colloquially as amapanyaza. Hastily appointed in what was viewed as a populist move, the wardens lack the legal authority of peace officers.

The ANC, at various national conferences when it was still the majority government, touted metro police being integrated into the SAPS as a solution to low police numbers, but this would still have been subjected to centralised control.

Mchunu said earlier in August that metro police resources could assist the SAPS, but an actual devolution of power would be investigated in the future. He said he would meet metro police commissioners to discuss the issue.  

Police members who spoke to the M&G, but are not authorised to speak to the media and thus cannot be named, expressed “optimism” that Mchunu’s statements about capacitation were “positive”, but added that Cele had made similar pronouncements.  

There was, however, additional optimism that Mchunu would be able to “cut through red tape”, something Cele seemed “incapable” of, or “unwilling” to do.

Low public trust 

The demand for a quality, trusted police service is urgent. According to the third quarter crime statistics for 1 October 2023 to 31 December 2023, released in February, there are 86 murders, 170 sexual assaults, 88 attempted murders and 66 carjackings daily in South Africa.

Research by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), published in 2022, found that from 1998 to 2021, trust levels in the police remained “relatively low”.

“Not once during this 23-year interval did more than half the adult public say they trusted the police,” said the HSRC. In 2021, the time of the July riots, public trust in the police plummeted to 27%, according to the research.   

In May this year, in a parliamentary reply to the DA, Cele said 5.4 million case dockets were closed without being resolved since the 2018/19 financial year because of insufficient evidence. 

Mkhwanazi is adamant that delegating the recruitment and structuring of police to the SAPS provincial office — “not the provincial government”, he emphasised  — was crucial to quality policing and combating crime. 

He said a significant challenge was provincial commissioners managing operational budgets but lacking control of compensation budgets, which cover salary structuring and benefits.

While he can allocate funds for vehicles, overtime and accommodation, he has no control over salary structures. He said this limitation hindered the ability to recruit and retain essential personnel, as well as to reward high performers or address pay disparities.

If provincial commissioners had control over structuring and compensation budgets, they could better address critical staffing needs by eliminating redundant positions and bolstering essential ones. “It is very, very difficult to get rid of them, so they just stay employed,” he said of underperformers in the service.

The authority to structure comes from the national police commissioner, who delegates to provincial commissioners. Mkhwanazi said he fully understood that with the delegation of additional authority came the need for additional checks and balances to ensure there was no abuse. 

Better policing vs more police stations

He also advocated for provincial commissioners to determine the number of police stations in their areas, emphasising that visible policing is more effective than merely increasing the number of stations.

“Your car becomes your office,” he said, adding that officers patrolling neighbourhoods are more effective than members of the public having to trek to police stations.

“When you are in your home, you must have the comfort of knowing that at any given time there is a patrol car nearby [that can respond to incidents] within five minutes. You [shouldn’t] have to go into a police station.”

This approach aligns with sector policing, a concept introduced to South Africa years ago, but one that requires buy-in from the top echelons, operational capacity, skills and competent management.

Although additional investigative authority for metro police could help the SAPS, Mkhwanazi warned that extensive training would also be required for metro officers.

With additional investigative authority, “those metro police will also need to have access to SAPS systems and have the ability to engage with prosecutors and attend court. They will have to write items into forensic evidence,” he said.

Any arrests made by metro police must be sent to the SAPS, whose overworked and under-resourced detectives are the ones equipped to investigate the cases and ensure they are prosecution ready.  

This could include something as seemingly mundane as a lone operator arrested by metro police for stealing copper piping. A detective faced with murder dockets would rightly prioritise those over petty incidents of crime, Mkhwanazi said.

Jurisdictional scuffles

There would also be jurisdictional difficulties, he said. If, for example, a crime committed in the metro involved suspects living outside the area, the metro police could be hampered, necessitating involvement by the SAPS.

According to Guy Lamb, who chairs the National Planning Commission’s task team on justice, crime prevention and security, there is ample literature pointing to jurisdictional issues leading to scuffles over turf.

Lamb said he understood Mkhwanazi’s reservations.

“SAPS and metro work together on a regular basis, and obviously when it comes to investigating crime, SAPS leads. While metro police will bring capacity support, they are not trained in [investigations] and are not at the same level as police detectives,” he said.

Capacity issues would need to be addressed, said Lamb, which could be done through legislation, but metro police or law enforcement officers would still need to meet the standards set by the SAPS, and would have to be trained by the police service.

Lamb said Mkhwanazi’s frustration with centralised policing powers was also understandable, given that he had served as an acting national commissioner and now worked as the commissioner of a province with a high crime rate.

Resources should be allocated in terms of the problems that are being faced, he said.  

As for the seeming lack of enthusiasm by the SAPS to embrace sector policing, Lamb said it had to do with institutional reform and “reluctance to do something different”.

“SAPS’s approach to crime and policing has always been the crime combat approach, and that has stuck within the crime combatting plan. That has been around since the 90s, and they have shown a reluctance to do any other form of policing, whether it’s problem-oriented policing or community-oriented policing.”

Sector policing was never seriously taken up by SAPS management “because it is a bottom up approach, and that is exactly what Mkhwanazi is trying to point out”, said Lamb.  

He said the pushback would come from the hierarchical nature of the police, which would be reluctant to relinquish decision-making power to provincial sectors.

There had been continued resistance to any form of reform within the SAPS, he said, using the National Crime Prevention Strategy of 1996 as an example.

“The idea had been that police were supposed to work with other government departments, but SAPS didn’t make any effort for that to happen because there were potential budget implications and the loss of a kind of relevance. So, they just pushed their own crime combating strategy, and the 1996 strategy died.”

Efforts to bring in sector policing “took a long time, decades”, Lamb said, and there had never been any efforts to hold SAPS to account in reporting on it. It was viewed as “a nice add-on”.

Lamb was involved in drafting the integrated crime and violence prevention strategy, “which has been sitting with SAPS for quite a while now”.

The strategy was approved by cabinet in 2022.

“But SAPS has delayed launching it because it goes back to the idea that you have to work with other government departments, that to solve crime, you have to address its drivers and its causes at a local level. SAPS doesn’t do that,” said Lamb, adding that with all matters policing in the country, there was also “no money” for implementation of the plan. 

In addition, the SAPS performance management system, which is structured at a national level, was “very problematic”, he said, and created “perverse incentives”. Because officers are measured, judged and evaluated on the number of arrests they make, it is not uncommon for them to take part in what is essentially fraudulent behaviour.

As an example, said Lamb, certain crimes would be misreported because specific categories had to be shown to be decreasing, meaning a murder could be reported as an assault.  

Mkhwanazi said he was “drilling” the idea of sector-specific policing into station commanders. “People don’t need a building” for effective policing, he said. “They need a service.”

All an officer needed to police an area would then be “a piece of A4 paper and a clipboard and pen”, he said. Ideally the information should be captured digitally, but then he would have to go through head office to procure the necessities, which would end up eating into budgets because of inflated prices by “middlemen”. 

To improve policing, he said authority should be rendered to execute what was needed at a provincial level, “and the authority to be able to execute such in terms of resources must follow”. 

“Our performance plans, at the moment, align with national priorities, but there may be priorities in provinces of what the provincial government wants, for example, gang violence in the Western Cape, and political killings in KwaZulu-Natal,” Mkhwanazi said.

He said that after viewing presentations of the teams’ “credible reports”, the first generated since the Presidential eThekwini Working Group and the section 154 intervention team had started — and a presentation by the eThekwini metro — he was “satisfied” with the direction of the work being undertaken.

“We are going to interrogate these reports … and in a month or two, we will come back to engage deeply on issues [in the reports] as well as the turnaround plans,” he told journalists in Durban.

The new ANC mayor of Durban, Cyril Xaba, was also in the closed meeting, but did not attend the media briefing.  

President Cyril Ramaphosa established the eThekwini Working Group in February after myriad complaints from members of the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry — which represents well over 3 000 formal businesses and 54 000 informal traders — as well as ratepayers associations, civil society and organised labour. 

The team is led by former MEC and former deputy ANC KwaZulu-Natal chairperson Mike Mabuyakhulu, and is expected to assist the municipality for two years. 

 The other group that presented on Tuesday was the section 154 intervention team.

Talk about a serious intervention in the metro municipality has been ongoing for years, but was consistently scuppered by the then dominant ANC in the metro and province, which also rejected those tentatively chosen to lead the intervention — former city manager Mike Sutcliffe, former director general in the presidency Cassius Lubisi and the Moses Kotane Institute’s Thandeka Ellinson.

Opposition parties were at the same time calling for a section 139 intervention, which would effectively have branded the metro as dysfunctional and in need of administration for failing its constitutional and executive obligations.

A compromise was finally reached when the opposition settled on the less debilitating section 154 intervention, proposed by the ANC, but again, there was little to no movement.

In June, following a power-sharing agreement being finalised in the province after the ANC lost its majority in the May elections, KZN’s new IFP Cogta MEC, Thulasizwe Buthelezi, said the section 154 intervention would go ahead. He said Sutcliffe and Lubisi had been appointed as the governance experts to lead the process.  

Asked on Tuesday about possible duplication of work by the two teams, Hlabisa said the presidential working group and the section 154 team should work in an “integrated” manner.

“Both the teams want to turn things around in eThekwini and make the environment conducive for business to thrive and for the municipality to provide services. From Cogta’s point of view, we will fully support the integration, the working together of all who are intervening to turn things around in eThekwini,” he said.

How this integration would specifically work was still to be considered, he said, adding that both reports addressed “core needs” such as revitalising tourism and economy in the city. That revitalisation was dependent on an “effective government”, he said, one that maintained infrastructure, could supply potable water, and keep its residents safe.

“Without addressing those key issues, business will run away.”

He said it was “a very good sign” that the latest Durban Business Confidence Index had risen to 55.49 (out of 100). The national index for the same period was 35. The Durban business confidence for the preceding quarter measured 38.42.

The improvement was attributed to the May elections and no political party gaining an outright majority, forcing parties into coalitions.

“The ease and speed with which the government was established in KZN also signalled a political commitment to servicing the province,” the business confidence report said, adding however that more than 75% of those surveyed still said that complaints about service delivery were not dealt with in a reasonable time.

The eThekwini metro has been in an escalating state of disrepair for years, with incidents of fraud, corruption, water and electricity cuts, beaches riddled with E coli and poor or non-existent service delivery making regular headlines. 

The city loses 45% of its water to leaks and waste, according to the department of water and sanitation, and neglect of infrastructure continues to hamper businesses, residents and potential investors.

According to the auditor general’s consolidated reports on municipalities, eThekwini incurred R4.8 billion in irregular expenditure and another R48.3 million in fruitless and wasteful expenditure for the 2021-22 financial year.

In 2018-19, the metro racked up R2.9 billion in unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure.

In late February leading into March this year, waste collection in the city came to a standstill, the result of a protracted strike by municipal employees after salary disputes that left refuse piled up in the streets and resulted in an outcry from residents and the business sector.

Prior to this, refuse collection in the city had been erratic for years, grass verges remained uncut, weed spraying was not done and thousands of streetlights were and are still not working. Crime in the city and its suburbs has been described as “out of control” by opposition parties, residents and community policing forums.   

Public trust in eThekwini interventions

Asked by the Mail & Guardian why residents and investors should trust that the recommendations made by the presidential intervention team and the section 154 team would be implemented, given the city’s treatment of the Manase report that was commissioned by KZN Cogta in 2011 and released in 2013, Hlabisa said he gained the impression on Tuesday that both teams knew the city and what they were doing.

He said he also knew the city and what was needed, because it was part of his constituency, and he would be “scrutinising the reports myself”.

“Where there is a need for consequence management, it will have to take place,” he said.

The recommendations of the section 154 report, when finalised, would be “considered” by the cooperative governance department at a provincial level, by the KwaZulu-Natal government, and the national department would also support any consequence management that needed to take place, he said.

Any other questions about the Manase report should be directed to eThekwini mayor Cyril Xaba, Hlabisa said.

Tabled in 2013, the 7050-page Manase report investigated the two terms of former ANC eThekwini mayor Obed Mlaba. Although he was singled out in the report and prima facie evidence of wrongdoing was found, Mlaba never faced any consequences, and was instead appointed South Africa’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom.

The report, which cost R15 million to compile, also found evidence of fraud within the metro police, numerous supply chain irregularities, non-disclosure of business interests for councillors and the use of by-laws to push through emergency tenders.

In 2020, then standing committee on public accounts member Mervyn Dirks, who was chairing a meeting at which the KwaZulu-Natal cooperative governance department was presenting, asked the team why it had not yet tackled “the rot” in the Manase report. The team replied that the report had been “dealt with”, but it was not sure if “consequence management” had taken place.

“We must state that this government will implement a strict zero-tolerance approach to non-compliance to treasury regulations and prescripts. We want to ensure accountability,” Rodgers added.  

He was speaking at the KwaZulu-Natal legislature in Pietermaritzburg while tabling the R680.901 million provincial treasury budget vote for 2024-25.

As a result of fiscal consolidation, R27.88 million had been cut from the budget, he said, a fate that other departments had also suffered.

That cut is expected to significantly impede provincial treasury’s ability to hire more accountants and auditors to assist departments, municipalities and state-owned entities to achieve clean audits and ensure financial governance. Rodgers said it was imperative that coats were cut according to the fiscal cloth, and that service delivery and clean governance remained a priority.

He was appointed to the portfolio on 18 June, following a power sharing agreement reached with the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and others after the ANC lost its provincial majority in the May elections.

Known as a stickler for running a tight financial ship, within his first week, Rodgers closed the treasury’s secondary office in Durban, saying it would save the the department about R1.1 million annually.

The provincial treasury is often lauded as a beacon of good governance among other KwaZulu-Natal government departments, none of which have escaped scrutiny for various corruption scandals. This year marked the 16th consecutive clean audit for the department, said Rodgers.

He also said there would be a cut of 25% on nice-to-haves, including subsistence and travel (S&T). In the last financial year, a billion rand had been spent on S&T, he said.   

He highlighted the severe fiscal constraints his department and others would be working under, saying that innovation was needed to keep the administration “financially afloat, cash positive, transformative — both economically and socially, and deepen good financial governance in all departments, municipalities and public entities”.

The provincial treasury is known as an historic under spender — one of the key reasons being the high level of vacancies in the department — but Rodgers said that preliminary year-end results indicated “that we have spent 98% of our budget at the end of the 2023-24 year and achieved 89% of all targets set, whilst a further 15 targets were overachieved due to the increase in demand for services”.

Although a commitment had been made to fill 146 posts in the department by 31 May this year, only 89 had been finalised, said Rodgers, the result of a lack of suitable candidates, posts being filled by internal candidates and other vacancies thus occurring, or resignations, with those who resigned moving to other departments.

While tabling the R784.153 million budget for the office of the premier on Tuesday, Premier Thami Ntuli said his office would roll out a new forensic case management system to help keep track of all forensic investigations across the provincial government. The system would make it easier to record, organise and monitor the investigations, he said.

The slow pace of forensic investigations by the premier’s office under previous ANC administrations, ostensibly for the protection of ANC leaders in government, had long been a bone of contention for both the DA and IFP. 

At one point, in 2023, the office of the premier’s forensic investigations unit had on its books 73 unresolved cases, according to a report presented to the province’s standing committee on public accounts.

Ntuli also allocated R77.507 million to the Zulu royal household, slightly less than the R79 million allocated in 2023. The 2023 allocation was a hike of R12 million from the previous year. 

He was speaking at the Union Buildings in Pretoria before signing into law the controversial NHI Bill, which critics have called “flawed” in its current iteration and a “populist policy” to garner votes at the 29 May polls.

After intimating that the detractors of the bill were white and privileged – something he had said on Tuesday – the president softened his tone when ending his speech, saying there should not be anxiety associated with the scheme, and that it would be “phased in”, with key milestones in each phase.

“Some fear that ‘boom’, it’s just going to happen. Take heart and courage [and know that] it will be phased in so every sub-milestone becomes an important one to make NHI more effective,” he said.

Ramaphosa did not mention where the money would come from to fund the scheme. “The way it will be paid for … is meant to contain comprehensive costs …” he fumbled, in turn reading from his prepared speech and speaking off the cuff.

Prior to this, he said the “real challenge” in implementing the scheme lay not in a lack of funds “but in the misallocation of resources that currently favours the private health sector at the expense of public health needs”.

Funding for the NHI has become a source of speculation for over-burdened taxpayers, with estimates that R200 billion is needed to fund it – an amount that is out of reach.

According to a February statement from health services group Discovery, if VAT is used to secure the amount, it would have to be increased from 15% to 21.5%. If personal income tax is used, taxes would need to be increased by 31%.

Should the R200 billion be collected as part of payroll tax, there would need to be a deduction of about R1 072 per employee each month, which will increase to about R1 565 for those in the formal sector.

The bill was tabled in August 2019 but discussions about universal health care have been ongoing for two decades.  

Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) chief executive Busi Mavuso on Tuesday questioned whether appropriate consultation had taken place on the bill, saying if there had been such, changes would have been made given the vast number of detractors. Mavuso said the BLSA supported universal access to quality healthcare, but the bill in its current form was not workable.

“The government is rushing populist policy through parliament, which can only be seen to be an electioneering ploy, as the significant and meaningful public input into the NHI bill and its socioeconomic ramifications have not been considered,” she said.

In his speech on Wednesday, Ramaphosa said the NHI would reduce poverty and inequality, thereby “freeing up resources in poor families for other uses”.

“Achieving equity was what the struggle against apartheid was all about, and it continues to be about that. We cannot have a situation where a portion of the population lives under a poor system, and another under a privileged system.

“For those who would like to enjoy those privileges, you are on the wrong boat. The boat we are on is equality,” the president said, to cheers from the audience.

Later, he likened the government’s NHI ambitions to “trying to build a Rolls Royce system for all South Africans”.

On Monday, when Ramaphosa made it known that the bill would be made an Act, trade union Solidarity said it would “within an hour” of it being signed into law, start legal proceedings.

The South African Health Professionals Collaboration has also said it would approach the courts on behalf of its 25 000 public and private sector members.

Those opposing the NHI have said they are in favour of quality universal health care, but that the bill in its current form does not guarantee that, and also severely limits the scope of private medical aids.

While stating it fully supports “the objective of universal health coverage”, Business Unity South Africa said it would consider legal action because the current iteration of the bill was “unworkable, unaffordable, and not in line with the Constitution”.

The Democratic Nursing Association of South Africa (Denosa) has welcomed the signing of the bill, but said the country’s shortage of nurses still needs to be addressed. Labour federation Cosatu, of which Denosa is an affiliate, has also welcomed the signing, as has the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union and others.

The Democratic Alliance has already signalled its intention to challenge the scheme in court, saying Ramaphosa’s signing of the bill was an act of “sheer political desperation”. 

“After months of ignoring the ongoing implosion of ANC support, the party has finally realised that its 50% majority will become a thing of the past at the election on the 29th of May,” party leader John Steenhuisen said on Tuesday.

“Out of desperation, it cast around for any populist lever it could pull in the hopes of magically boosting its terminal fortunes.”

The Economic Freedom Fighters last year called the passing of the bill by the National Assembly “catastrophic”, with its main concern being that its beneficiaries were not close to healthcare facilities. 

The Inkatha Freedom Party has said it would lead a process of reviewing the NHI and its funding model, while ActionSA has said that by signing the bill into law, Ramaphosa would be enabling “a second phase of state capture”.

The 25-year-old already has war stories about alleged police, drug lord and municipal “encounters” which belie his age and the three years in which he has been a cannabis store owner.

By his own account, King has lost track of the number of times he has been “engaged” by police for being a cannabis seller.  

“The [older] police are still of the mentality that cannabis is a drug — dagga. And, unfortunately, we can’t stop that,” he told the Mail & Guardian. 

But, said King, there had been improvement in the attitude of officers since the advent of a South African Police Service directive last year that instructed them to  “respect the privacy right of cannabis cultivators and users and to ensure the least intrusive measures are used when securing an accused’s court attendance”. 

The father of two owns five cannabis stores in eThekwini and will soon open a sixth in the upmarket Durban North area — a far cry from the first Canna Kings store he launched in the working-class suburb of Umbilo in late 2021, and still owns. 

His other stores are in Pinetown and the Durban suburbs of Montclair, Glenwood and Hillary. Other illegal substances and alcohol are banned in all the shops.  

Today, King has a staff complement just shy of a dozen and he says business is good. 

Although King is reticent about sharing his monthly turnover, it exceeds the R90 000 personal loan he used to start the business. 

This was after Covid-19 lockdowns “crippled” the e-hailing vehicles he owned. His profit is healthy, he says, but as more competition enters the market, “margins are getting squeezed”.

The first few years were “tough”, he admitted, but “discipline and financial management” allowed for expansion. He is a tax-paying citizen and contributes to UIF, he stressed, proof that although the “gangster” stigma is rife in the industry, above-board cannabis businesses can and do contribute to the economy.

“All of my legal boxes are checked. It’s just the legislation that is holding me back.”

King says his ambition is to open branches throughout South Africa, once legislation is passed and to finally have “the freedom to grow without worry”.

Like thousands of cannabis entrepreneurs countrywide, King uses an assumed “grey area” in legislation that enables him to source supply from across South Africa and sell a variety of cannabis-infused products to anyone over the age of 18 for personal use, be it recreational or medicinal.

Communities in the vicinity of his stores have been open to the concept, he said, and he has been surprised by the demographic of consumers. At his Glenwood and Umbilo stores, most clients are students, but in others, the ages range well into the 50s.

The Cannabis for Private Purposes bill is awaiting the signature of President Cyril Ramaphosa, after being passed earlier this year by the National Council of Provinces, but King deems it “bullshit” and “restrictive”.

“You’re allowed to do this, but you are not allowed to do that. If they legalise this, they must go all the way, not have one foot in and one foot out of the door,” he said.

The bill allows for the growth, possession and consumption of cannabis, but restricts the amount that can be possessed and carried in public. 

It also prohibits the sale of the plant without a licence or a permit. 

The framework for commercialisation has been left for later discussion.

The enabling legislative framework for hemp and cannabis is part of Ramaphosa’s Operation Vulindlela. The president has said the potential multi-billion rand industry could create 130 000 jobs, but movement has been at a snail’s pace as existing policies have to be eased. 

According to King, cannabis should be viewed as the fuel for a new economic revolution.

“I think the government is holding back [on cutting the red tape] because they are trying to figure out how to benefit more from it. 

“But you can’t constrain this,” he said, adding that when the full potential of cannabis is unleashed on the economy, it will bring “exciting changes”.