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Government criticised for blaming Covid for the country’s literacy crisis

Viewfinder — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 07:17:16 +0000

The Department of Basic Education briefed Parliament on Tuesday after the Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study showed that eight out of ten Grade 4 learners could not read for meaning. (Photo: Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp)

In Parliament on Tuesday, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) blamed poor literacy rates and the failure of its National Reading Plan (implemented in 2019) on the Covid pandemic.

Last week, the Progress on International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) results revealed that 81% of South African Grade 4 children cannot read for meaning. In 2016 it was 78%.

The department is currently reviewing a national reading sector plan in an attempt to tackle the literacy crisis in learners’ foundation phase.

The department’s chief director for foundations for learning Kulula Manona told MPs that due to the Covid pandemic about 54% of contact time was lost in 2020, and 22% in 2021.

But DA MP Baxolile Nodada (the party’s shadow minister for education) said the department had not taken responsibility for the “devastating” literacy rate.

Nodada said that “wholly blaming Covid-19 on the outcomes of the PIRLS results is quite meek”, and that it was disappointing that the DBE was not taking some accountability for the literacy results.

Nodada also questioned the current National Reading Plan, which he said was not budgeted and lacked coordination in provincial departments. He also questioned whether there was an intention for the reading plan to be budgeted for going forward.

Viewfinder and GroundUp recently revealed d how the National Reading Plan and “massive reading campaign” never got off the ground, despite the DBE claiming it had been implemented in all nine provinces.

Manona said a revised plan will address the gaps and challenges. The new reading sector strategy will focus on four strands, as opposed to the previous plan that focused on ten. The focus areas include: culturally relevant learning and teaching resources, skilled and versatile teachers, involved communities and parents, and an explicit policy framework.

Manona said the DBE is aware there are “systemic challenges” facing schools and teachers, such as class sizes in the foundation phase. Shortage of teachers is another issue.

Last week, Viewfinder and GroundUp reported on teachers in no-fee schools in Makhanda facing challenges with overcrowded classrooms and teacher shortages making it difficult for learners to receive one-on-one support.

Minister Angie Motshekga also spoke in Parliament on Tuesday. She said the literacy crisis is a “multi-layered” issue that included overcrowded classrooms, poverty, and lack of supportive parents. She said it would take joint responsibility to fix the literacy crisis and “it takes a village to raise a child”. Motshekga also said “it’s not money” but rather “many other things”.

Motshekga said the PIRLS was not a competition and it gave the DBE an opportunity to learn from developed countries.

Equal Education (EE) released a statement on Tuesday criticising the department’s failure to “address the deep cracks in the [education] system”.

EE said the DBE cannot blame the literacy crisis on the pandemic alone.

“The ongoing reading crisis … shows how poorly the government and education departments have recognised the multiple challenges in the sector and have failed to muster the necessary political will to address them,” said EE.

Viewfinder’s reporting on the Reading Crisis is produced in collaboration with GroundUp.

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SA’s kids have lost a decade of reading progress, study shows

Viewfinder — Wed, 17 May 2023 04:51:24 +0000

A total of 82% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning, the same proportion as in 2011. (Photo: Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp)

An international literacy study has confirmed that 81% of South Africa’s Grade 4 children could not read for meaning in any language in 2021, almost exactly the same proportion as in 2011. This means that a decade of slow progress in reading has been wiped out.

The child literacy rate observed by the Progress on International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in 2011 was 82%. In 2016, the figure was 78%.

Learning losses associated with the Covid-19 pandemic are the main reason for the slide backwards since 2011. But a research paper published to coincide with the PIRLS results has shown that the Department of Basic Education (DBE) has done almost nothing to help children catch up on lost time. Viewfinder and GroundUp also revealed last week that the department’s National Reading Plan, which it has touted in Parliament as a success, is actually a serious failure from a planning, implementation and monitoring perspective.

More than 12,000 South African learners from 321 schools participated in the 2021 round of PIRLS. The study is conducted every five years. Of the 57 countries and regions that participated, South Africa performed the worst.

Professor Nic Spaull, an education economist from Stellenbosch University and a member of the Reading Panel 2030 set up to monitor reading interventions, hosted a briefing on the results a few hours after they were published on Tuesday. He pointed out that South Africa was two to five years behind other middle-income countries, such as Jordan, Egypt, Iran and Brazil.

The results, Spaull said, were indicative of a wider “generational catastrophe” for more than 4-million primary school children whose education had been disrupted by the pandemic.

“Research on school closures from natural disasters like earthquakes in Pakistan and the Ebola crisis in West Africa all shows that there are long-term consequences to short-term crises. These include lower educational attainment, lower earnings, higher unemployment and being more likely to be in lower-skilled occupations in adulthood,” he said.

Also at the briefing was Professor Ursula Hoadley from the University of Cape Town’s Education Department. Hoadley’s most recent paper, published on Tuesday, mapped out learning losses in public schools. She criticised the DBE for a “business as usual” approach, noting that there are no nationally coordinated programmes or attempts to recoup class time and learning losses. One notable exception is in the Western Cape where the provincial Department of Education recently launched its R1.2-billion #BackOnTrack campaign.

Hoadley’s paper showed that learning losses associated with the pandemic were worse for learners in South Africa’s poorest provinces and communities, deepening education inequality in the country. These findings were mirrored in the PIRLS results, which showed that learners in Afrikaans- and English-language schools experienced no decline in reading outcomes when compared to the previous five-year cycle of the study, which ended in 2016. In comparison, African-language schools showed significant declines.

Universal literacy for ten-year-olds is one of the top five goals in President Cyril Ramaphosa Medium Term Strategic Framework for addressing poverty, inequality and unemployment.

The Department of Basic Education is tasked by the president with putting policy interventions in place and with guiding the provinces in a nationally coordinated program. Viewfinder and GroundUp last week published findings based on exclusive access to the department’s National Reading Plan and progress reports. These documents showed that there is no “massive reading campaign” underway in South Africa, as promised by the president during his State of the Nation Address in 2019.

The department has blamed the Covid-19 pandemic for its failure to properly implement the plan.

Ahead of the PIRLS results launch, we requested comment from the Department’s spokesman Elijah Mhlanga. He responded saying that our reporting was “faulty” and directed us to attend the department’s seminar on reading literacy, which was scheduled to coincide with the PIRLS launch. Mhlanga did not respond to a follow-up query about which aspects of Viewfinder and GroundUp’s reporting he found to be faulty.

At the seminar, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga delivered the opening address.

“We are finalising our revised National Reading Plan to address the gaps in our approach,” she said.

“Our plan will ensure further provision of minimum learning and teaching support material especially designed to support reading … The plan will expand the implementation of more direct and targeted training and support. The primary focus will be on home-language literacy as children need to learn to read in a language that they understand.”

This article was jointly produced by Viewfinder and GroundUp.

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Revealed: How Angie Motshekga’s reading plan failed SA’s kids

Viewfinder — Wed, 10 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

by Daneel Knoetze and Liezl Human

A “massive reading campaign” for South African schools announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2019 has never got off the ground, despite triumphant claims in Parliament by the Department of Basic Education (DBE). Viewfinder and GroundUp can reveal that the Department’s National Reading Plan – which it had not made publicly available – is a seriously deficient document. Far from being a success, its supposed implementation is a collection of random, uncoordinated activities by provincial education departments with no proper monitoring.

In his 2019 Medium Term Strategic Framework, Ramaphosa announced “five fundamental goals” for the government over the next ten years. Ensuring that “every ten-year-old will be able to read for meaning” was one.

“This is essential in equipping children to succeed in education, in work and in life – and it is possibly the single most important factor in overcoming poverty, unemployment and inequality,” Ramaphosa said in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) in February 2019.

“If we are to ensure that within the next decade, every ten-year-old will be able to read for meaning, we will need to mobilise the entire nation behind a massive reading campaign,” Ramaphosa added upon his re-election later that year.

President Cyril Ramaphosa ahead of delivering the State of the Nation Address in February 2019. (Archive photo: Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp)

In South Africa, 78% of the country’s ten-year-olds could not read for meaning in 2016. Though literacy had been slowly improving since 2006, experts expect a significant drop in the number of children who can read to be confirmed by results from the Progress on International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), to be published on 16 May.

The implications of this are alarming, not only for the learners but for the country as a whole. Last year, against a backdrop of spiralling youth unemployment, the Department of Higher Education and Training identified a lack of “reading comprehension” as the number one skill deficit in the country’s labour market.

So what went wrong?

Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga last year attributed the decline in reading outcomes to the Covid-19 pandemic, saying that learning losses had been experienced the world over. But Viewfinder and GroundUp’s exclusive access to the department’s National Reading Plan and its implementation reports show that the crisis is also the result of serious failures within Motshekga’s department.

Early in 2020 the DBE incorporated the President’s goal into its Strategic Plan. The department announced a newly developed “sector reading plan”, which it said would include the rollout of improved reading materials in African languages and better teacher training, based on findings from its long-running Early Grade Reading Study.

Last year, echoing the president’s ambition of a coordinated, nationwide programme to tackle illiteracy, the department’s Director General Hubert Mweli reported to Parliament that this National Reading Plan had been implemented by all nine provinces.

“All provinces have implemented the reading plan,” he said. “How do I know this? I know this because I chair meetings every year where they present reports on the implementation of their reading programmes. And for the past five to six years, provinces have been presenting reports based on this reading plan.”

“So every province has got a reading plan. [To] that I can put my head on the block,” Mweli went on.

But experts from the Reading Panel 2030 – a civil society organisation set up to monitor the government’s progress towards Ramaphosa’s goal – pointed out that this national reading plan had never been made public. Also, there is scant evidence in the department’s annual report, for the year Mweli was referring to, to substantiate his claim of universal implementation.

The plan and the provincial education departments’ progress reports for 2022/23, obtained through a public records request by Viewfinder and GroundUp, confirm that no “massive reading campaign” is underway in South Africa.

These records show that poor planning from the national department; random, uncoordinated reading interventions by most of the provincial education departments; and disorganised monitoring and evaluation of these interventions are all drivers of the country’s reading crisis.

What is the National Reading Plan?

The National Reading Plan, made public here for the first time, is a document that consists of a front page and a table listing 47 activities under ten thematic areas. Each “activity” has annual targets for every one of the plan’s five years: 2019/20 to 2023/24.

The plan contains a wide range of proposed activities: from rolling out classroom libraries and improved teacher training, to encouraging food companies to follow the Chappies bubblegum example of incorporating reading materials into their packaging. There is no information about how these interventions are to be implemented, who would be accountable, and how these are to be funded.

(Graphic: Nathi Ngubane)

An interview with the department’s head of research monitoring and evaluation, Stephen Taylor, revealed that the plan, never intended for public release, was developed to “guide” provincial education departments on activities they should pursue to improve reading outcomes. Taylor was speaking with current affairs television program Carte Blanche in a Viewfinder produced insert on the National Reading Plan.

On request, Taylor shared the provincial departments’ most recent progress reports on the plan’s implementation for the 2022/23 year. These reports, published here for the first time, show a disparity and a lack of coordination between the efforts of the nine provincial departments. For instance, whereas the Western Cape department’s report is detailed and extensively referenced, the Limpopo department’s report contains fewer than 200 words. The Reading Panel 2030 had previously pointed out that the Western Cape was the only province that had budgeted for and implemented a province-wide reading programme.

“Chaotic” reports

Professor Sarah Chapman, from the University of Cape Town’s Commerce Faculty, is an expert in monitoring and evaluation. She said the Reading Plan lacked a proper monitoring and evaluation framework, which would have included an implementation plan and an impact theory. A proper implementation plan, Chapman said, would have provided the provincial departments with a model on who exactly was supposed to do what, and how these activities were to be rolled out. An impact theory would have provided provinces with a rationale for why these activities would bring about the outcomes that the plan sought to achieve: improved reading outcomes for children.

The vast majority of ten-year-old children in South Africa cannot read for meaning. (Photo: Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp)

The overall result of these shortcomings in the plan, she said, was that the provinces’ reports were “chaotic”.

“My impression is [that the provinces] were just including anything that they have done – teacher training, press releases, attendance registers, any partnership with an NGO. There’s no theory around how this fits together and why specific activities are important and why they would lead to any intended outcomes,” she said.

Documentation included by the provinces as supposed evidence for their activities had not been collated into a monitoring and evaluation framework.

“A monitoring framework would have tracked the logic of the programme. I’m not seeing that,” Chapman said.

The provinces’ reports rarely included measurements of progress towards the annual targets laid out in the plan.

“If they had that data, then they would have reported against the [plan’s] targets. They would have said we’ve moved towards the target by so much. But, these reports definitely weren’t doing that. From a monitoring and evaluation perspective, one cannot say that the strategy was implemented successfully. There’s no evidence for that,” she concluded.

The department’s response

The department’s spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga did not respond to a request for comment on these criticisms of the plan.

In response to a records request, the department provided a writeup of what it considered some achievements towards the plan’s implementation. This response, which did not refer directly to the 47 activities listed in the plan, included metrics on teacher training and delivery of materials to schools, but the numbers involved were very small.

Asked to respond to the suggestion that the plan and its implementation were “an abject failure”, the DBE’s Taylor said: “Well, I think it would be very unfair to call the existing plan and the weaknesses and the implementation against the existing plan an abject failure because of the timing of this plan. As I’ve said, this plan was something that was approved just before the pandemic set in, and we had to respond to the priorities caused by the pandemic.

Taylor added: “We really do agree that this is a priority. And that’s why we are working on a new revised version of the reading plan, which we hope to make a public document. It needs to succeed in bringing better coordination to the sector. Because in the last four years, a lot has happened. Lots of activities have happened, but they’ve often been rather uncoordinated.”

GroundUp asked for comment from Mweli, his personal assistant and the department’s spokesperson, Elijah Mhlanga. This provided Mweli with an opportunity to respond to the conclusion that his claim in Parliament – that the reading plan was implemented by all nine provinces – was false. He did not respond.

This article was jointly produced by Viewfinder and GroundUp. Additional reporting by Marecia Damons.

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Watch: Reading crisis

Viewfinder — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 19:00:00 +0000

This Carte Blanche episode was co-produced by Viewfinder and aired on M-Net on 30 April 2023.

by Daneel Knoetze and Liezl Human

Teaching children to read is fundamental to their future success. But for a country already battling massive youth unemployment and an adult literacy crisis, it’s emerged that close to 80% of Grade 4 learners cannot read with understanding in any of the 11 official languages. Government has warned of the crisis and, in 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa promised to prioritise reading through a National Reading Plan. But, through exclusive access, Carte Blanche shows how Department of Basic Education documents reveal a plan in disarray, continuing to fail our children. Despite this, education officials continue to proclaim the National Reading Plan a success. Carte Blanche investigates.

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Police deal with watchdog will protect violent cops

Viewfinder — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 03:41:01 +0000

Police commanders will be empowered to overrule watchdog findings against their colleagues when a new agreement between the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) takes effect. The draft agreement was attached as an annexure in police minister Bheki Cele’s response to Parliamentary questions last month.

But, a recent presentation to Parliament showed that the veto powers contained in this agreement are already being used by the police on a large scale across the country.

IPID officials have in the past complained that the police ride roughshod over many of its findings and disciplinary recommendations against officers implicated in such crimes as torture, murder, rape and corruption. In the most extreme instances, police management outright refuses to even initiate disciplinary steps. This, in spite of the law saying that the police cannot do so.

A recent joint SAPS and IPID presentation to Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Policing revealed that the police refused to take disciplinary steps in 229 cases, or more than half of the 550 IPID cases it “finalised” in 2020/21. This is the highest such figure on record. In all of these 229 cases, IPID investigators concluded that police officers had a case to answer. They were overruled by SAPS management.

Yet, the police’s departmental systems have few checks and balances against their commanders overruling IPID with the intention of protecting their colleagues from consequences for their actions.

“If I’m the commander and my member that I want, that I’m buddy-buddy with, has done something, I’m not going to take steps against him. I’m going to do everything to stop steps from being taken,” said an IPID official, quoted on condition of anonymity in Viewfinder’s prior exposé on SAPS consequence management.

A new Viewfinder data analysis has indicated that police decisions to override findings against their members are final, even if they are questionable. Viewfinder looked at an IPID case data sample of 202 cases where SAPS refused to act on IPID’s recommendations against officers. In at least 32 of those cases, SAPS’s refusal was at odds with both IPID and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). The NPA placed those cases on court rolls across the country, despite it having a much higher burden of proof to secure a conviction in court, compared to SAPS in disciplinary hearings.

These 32 cases included complaints of severe assaults or shootings by police which left people badly injured. In one case a Nelspruit man complained that a sergeant punched him continuously, breaking his teeth. In another case a man from Mahwelereng, Limpopo accused officers of suffocating him with a plastic bag and pepper spraying him during an interrogation.

In one case police reportedly shot and killed a fleeing suspect in Tembisa, Gauteng. In another case police allegedly shot and killed a man after he was pulled over during a police stop on the road between Daveyton and Brentwood, Gauteng. The man had been driving with his wife, children and friends, according to IPID’s complaint description. In another case, from Welkom in the Free State, a police officer was accused of killing his wife and trying to cover it up.

Viewfinder has previously exposed a series of loopholes that senior police officers can use to undo IPID findings during police disciplinary proceedings. But, the above cases and the new “Terms of Reference” agreement between SAPS and IPID points to a different scenario. In these cases police commanders can overrule IPID findings ad hoc, without the police even starting a disciplinary process.

Viewfinder queried SAPS and IPID management about the draft “Terms of Reference for Disciplinary Hearing Committees” and their past relationship with regard to implementing IPID disciplinary recommendations.

IPID’s spokesperson Grace Langa said that the directorate does not necessarily agree with SAPS’s decisions that its recommendations often do not constitute a “prima facie” case against police officers.

“Since IPID has no power to implement its recommendation, but rely on SAPS to do so, only SAPS can be able to give reasons for not implementing the recommendations,” she said.

SAPS spokesperson Brigadier Mathapelo Peters said that “questionable outcomes” in disciplinary cases could be escalated to SAPS’s Provincial or National head offices. She said that SAPS did not “wish not to be drawn into accounting to the media on departmental issues” and declined to respond to questions related to the Terms of Reference, because they are yet to be concluded.

In response to questions Parliament’s police portfolio committee chair Tina Joemat-Pettersson said she agreed with Viewfinder’s findings.

“The committee has not had a chance to engage with the Terms of Reference. It is our view that agreements that undermine the spirit and intention of different pieces of legislation and which do not have legal standing will not be supported,” she said.

“We will never agree that the findings of the IPID can be overruled… This is something we will be addressing in the SAPS Amendment Bill as well as the IPID Amendment Bill.”

This article forms part of an ongoing investigation of police brutality and non-accountability in South Africa. It was funded, in part, by the Henry Nxumalo Fund for Investigative Reporting.

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SAPS’s use of deadly force must be curbed, concludes new expert report

Viewfinder — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 07:48:28 +0000

People killed while fleeing, while brandishing knives or when officers fire “warning” shots – these are some of the circumstances of killings by police examined in a new study on the use of lethal force by the South African Police Service (SAPS).

International policing expert Ignacio Cano, who authored the study for the African Policing Civilian Oversight Forum (APCOF), has studied some of the world’s most violent police forces. He helped develop a list of indicators for identifying the abuse of force by police.

Applied to Latin America, these indicators were used in a 2019 study to reveal patterns of the deadly abuses by police forces in Brazil, El Salvador and Venezuela.

“For most indexes, the values for South Africa are lower than for these Latin American countries,” Cano said at a webinar on Tuesday, where his report was launched. He was referring to values for indicators such as the number of people killed by police per 100,000 inhabitants and the percentage of a country’s total homicides which are attributed to police or security agents.

“Bear in mind that these Latin American countries were selected precisely because they have a problem of abuse of lethal force. So, the fact that South Africa fares relatively well in comparison to them is not necessarily a fair assessment, because you are comparing yourself with countries where the problem is most acute.”

Cano said the ratio of civilians killed by police to police killed on duty in South Africa – around 13 to one – was a cause for concern. This ratio may indicate excessive use of force. When it exceeds ten to one, according to a 1991 study by New York University law professor Paul Chevigny, it goes above the threshold of what is deemed a proportionate and acceptable level of force, vis-a-vis the dangers faced by police officers in executing their duties.

The study analysed a sample of case data from the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID), provided to APCOF by Viewfinder. Viewfinder accessed this database via a public records request (PAIA) in 2018, and also conducted data analyses and investigations into patterns of police brutality and the underpinnings of the lack of accountability by police in South Africa.

Cano followed a similar methodology to previous Viewfinder data analyses in that he consolidated, read and categorised a sample of complaint descriptions captured by IPID. The sample used for his study looked at deaths caused by police, deaths in police custody, and shooting complaints contained in the IPID case intake master register for the 2017/18 financial year.

The sample revealed that 390 people were killed by police officers using their firearms in the year under review. While most of the killings occurred in confrontations between police and criminal suspects, especially during robberies and hijackings, Cano’s analysis raised other alarming instances of killing.

Outside of the firearm related fatalities, seven deaths were attributed to alleged torture by police.

Twenty killings occurred in incidents where police fired warning shots. Though these “warning” shots were not necessarily the fatal shot, Cano pointed out that warning shots are bad practice. Warning shots are either ineffective in deterring suspects engaged in a life-threatening confrontation with police or civilians, or they have the potential to do more harm than good in non-life-threatening situations.

Looking at data related to police shooting complaints, Cano identified 45 incidents of police firing at fleeing suspects. In eleven such cases, the police killed the suspect.

“This is a grave violation of basic international principles, since lethal force can be used only if there is an imminent threat of death or serious injury to the police officer concerned or to somebody else … A fleeing person cannot legally be stopped through lethal force,” Cano wrote.

In 42 cases, police shot dead people who were armed with knives or other sharp objects. Cano said police should be able to deal with confronting suspects armed with knives by using less-than-lethal weapons, such as pepper-spray. If use of a firearm is unavoidable, police should aim at parts of a suspect’s body that are unlikely to cause a fatal injury.

As previously seen in IPID’s data, and affirmed by Viewfinder’s investigations, Cano’s report noted that KwaZulu-Natal accounts for a disproportionate number of killings by police in the country. He singled out several police stations in the eThekwini Metro – Umlazi, Inanda, Kwamashu and Pinetown – where five or more killings by police were registered in the year under review.

This latest report contributes to an ongoing push by policing experts, human rights organisations, civil society and several spheres of government to bring pressure on SAPS to curb torture, killings and brutality by its members.

In July 2019, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) launched the National Torture Preventative Mechanism (NPM). Earlier this year IPID, which is a partner in the NPM, announced that it will introduce a program whereby its investigators will proactively start monitoring police cells to identify and prevent instances of torture.

In May and August this year, Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Policing grilled SAPS on its poor track record in holding officers implicated in violent crimes accountable.

In March, police minister Bheki Cele made public a report by the Panel of Experts on Policing and Crowd Management, which was established in line with the recommendations of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry. The Panel of Experts recommended that Parliament consider the introduction of a new law to codify the rules that police must adhere to when using force. The basis for such a law already exists in a document called the “Model Bill for Use of Force by Police and other Law Enforcement Agencies in South Africa”, prepared by the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa in collaboration with APCOF.

In concluding his report, Cano cited the “Model Bill ” and also motivated for a “legal and regulatory framework regarding the use of force” in South Africa.

Cano also said that police should be trained not to shoot at fleeing suspects, not to make use of “warning” shots, and to be better prepared in dealing with suspects armed with knives by means other than resorting to the use of lethal force.

Viewfinder submitted a query to SAPS, asking for a response to the report and recommendations. SAPS did not respond.

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Tapes reveal secret workings of police disciplinary hearings for murder and brutality cases

Viewfinder — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 01:00:00 +0000

The mother of a dead child has given Viewfinder access to the tapes of a disciplinary hearing of the police officer accused of killing her son. The officer was found not guilty, though the police watchdog had concluded he had a case of “murder” and “misconduct” to answer. The tapes reveal the inner workings of South African Police Service (SAPS) hearings, from which brutality accused officers routinely emerge unpunished, and from which even the police watchdog is excluded.

When Lieutenant Michael Thebus appeared before a police disciplinary tribunal, accused of shooting a teenage boy in the back, there were only three other people in the room: two fellow police officers and Thebus’s union representative. The boy’s mother, Klarina Reed, waited in the foyer outside.

For SAPS the hearing was a legal requirement. The police watchdog — the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) — had found that Thebus had a case of “murder” and of “misconduct” to answer for in the killing of 15-year-old Damian Ahrendse in Wesbank, on the Cape Flats, a little under a year earlier.

It was the morning of 1 December 2014. As the hearing got underway inside a police station conference room at Melkbosstrand, north of Cape Town, the chairperson hit “record” on a voice recorder.

Those present introduced themselves: the chairperson Lieutenant Colonel Romburgh, Lieutenant Thebus, SAPS’s representative Captain Gerhard van den Bergh and the South African Policing Union’s Willem Coetzee.

The full recording of Lieutenant Michael Thebus’s disciplinary hearing, as received from SAPS following a public records request by Damian Ahrendse’s mother, Klarina Reed. (compiled and uploaded by Viewfinder).

Van den Bergh was the evidence leader, a role similar to a prosecutor in a trial. His job was to “charge” Thebus and to “lead evidence” on the conduct which gave rise to the hearing.

“We’ll put this thing through the process, and no one can point a finger afterwards,” he said during the opening phases of the hearing.

He then called a witness — Damian’s half-brother, Dominique van Wyk — who said that he had seen Thebus shoot at Damian. He called two police officers (Thebus’s partner Constable Adriaan Groenewald and his supervisor Captain JP Arendse) who testified to Thebus’s innocence. Finally, he called Thebus, the accused, to take the stand.

“As I have said, be calm. This is informal. You have seen that this is informal. The chairperson is not aggressive. The ER [employer representative] is not aggressive. Take a deep breath and tell us calmly your version of what transpired,” Van den Bergh said.

Lieutenant Michael Thebus

Thebus maintained that the person on whom he had fired was an armed suspect who threatened his life. He was “convinced” that it was not Damian.

On the second day, at about four hours into the hearing, Van den Bergh gave his closing statement. He said that Thebus’s version was accepted by his employer, SAPS.

“The employee, Lieutenant Thebus is thus found ‘not guilty’ of misconduct as charged,” Romburgh read as his verdict.

There was a loud exhalation.

“Thank you very much. No one would like to add anything?” Romburgh asked.

“No,” someone — unclear exactly who — said curtly over what was likely the sound of shuffling chairs and papers. Then, the recording ended.

Recording gives window into SAPS disciplinary proceedings

Apart from criminal prosecutions in court, police accountability for even the most serious offences – murders, torture, severe assaults and rapes by on-duty officers – depends on the integrity of SAPS disciplinary proceedings.

A recent Viewfinder investigation revealed that police officers almost always emerge from these proceedings unpunished. The investigation also exposed the loopholes and conflicts of interest built into SAPS discipline management. Soon after these findings were published, police commissioner General Khehla Sitole admitted to Parliament that police discipline management needed to be overhauled.

Police disciplinary hearings take place behind closed doors and are exempt from external oversight. Outcomes are often reported back to IPID without any explanation. Watchdog officials quoted in our investigation inferred, from their own experiences, that senior police officers in charge of discipline management exploited a series of loopholes to protect colleagues implicated in violent crimes from consequences for their actions.

Since Damian’s death, Klarina Reed has asked IPID and other government departments for answers about her son’s killing and about the lack of consequences for the police officer whom she believes was responsible.

Damian Ahrendse (photo: Anton Scholtz)

“There’s no real answer that they can give me. I’m coming back with empty hands, empty promises. Then I think, ‘Okay there will be another day for me’. And if I’ve got a taxi fare, then I’ll pick up these files again,” she said, with reference to her bundle of documents on the case.

Last year, Reed submitted a public records request to obtain the recordings of Michael Thebus’ disciplinary hearing.

The killing of Damian Ahrendse

On the one year anniversary of Damian’s death, days after Thebus was acquitted, Klarina Reed was back on the pavement outside her house on Etona Street in Wesbank. She had just finished serving potjiekos to a group of her dead son’s teenage friends. On an open field nearby, they played soccer in memory of Damian. On the sidewalk next to where Reed stood was the spot where her son had fallen one year earlier.

Klarina Reed, Damian Ahrendse’s mother, outside her home in Wesbank. (photo: Anton Scholtz)

On that evening, Friday 13 December 2013, Damian had stumbled around the corner and limped in the direction of his mother’s house, clutching his chest. A trickle of blood ran from his nose. A trail of blood lay splattered on the asphalt behind him, she recalls.

“I ran down to my brother Damian and asked him what was going on,” Donnecia Ahrendse, who was 19 at the time, said in her statement to investigators.

“Damian told me he had been shot. I asked him by who, and he told me by police.”

As Damian lay dying, a black double-cab Nissan bakkie with police insignia pulled up. Constable Adriaan Groenewald and Warrant Officer Michael Thebus, both detectives attached to Mfuleni Police Station, got out.

Dominique Van Wyk, Damian’s half-brother and a prominent member of the 26 Numbers gang, came running down the street.

“You shot my brother,” he said to Thebus, according to his statement.

Dominique van Wyk, Damian Ahrendse’s brother. (photo: Anton Scholtz)

The police officers looked at Damian. Groenewald instructed a bystander to put pressure on his wound. The pair then got back into the bakkie and drove away. In their statements later that evening, they explained that they radioed for an ambulance and went to search for the “suspects” they believed to have shot Damian.

The bullet that had ripped through Damian’s torso had perforated both his lungs. Neighbours lifted him into the back of a grey Corsa bakkie, where a young man named Rothrickus Lewis held him as they were driven to Delft Community Health Clinic. But it was too late. Lewis said in his statement that Damian was no longer breathing when he handed the boy’s slight frame to clinic staff. Damian was certified as “dead on arrival” at 7.30pm, about 23 minutes after he had collapsed on Etona Street.

Later, the nurses allowed Reed into the room where her son’s body lay. She and her daughter Donnecia stayed all night. At 6.26am an officer from the Western Cape Government’s Forensic Pathology Services came to collect the body.

One hundred crucial seconds, two conflicting versions.

When triangulated with witness statements, police vehicle movement records show that Michael Thebus fired his pistol somewhere between 7:05:35 pm and about 7:07:15 pm on the evening of 13 December 2013. During IPID’s investigation, two versions emerged of what happened in those 100 seconds.

According to Thebus and his partner Constable Groenewald’s statements, they were driving their in police bakkie pursuit of two armed “suspects” who had been involved in a shoot-out with police moments earlier. The police officers chased these gunmen onto an open field off Armada Street in Wesbank. Their bakkie got stuck in the sand. As Thebus got out, one of the fleeing suspects turned and pointed a gun at him and his partner. Thebus fired a single “warning shot” at the “suspect” who then turned and continued running out of sight. Thebus and his partner reasoned that this suspect may have been responsible for shooting Damian. Neither speculated that Damian and the “suspect” were the same person. Both were “under the impression” that Damian had been shot by the “suspects” that they had been chasing. A police shooting report would later concur that Thebus fired only one round of ammunition.

According to at least three other witnesses on the scene, a police officer shot at Damian Ahrendse and his friend Andrew Konna. Konna’s statement suggested that the pair had inadvertently been caught up in the heat of the officers’ pursuit of a suspect from an earlier shooting. Damian and Konna had started running as the police bakkie came charging across the open field in their direction. Konna said that an occupant of the bakkie fired several shots in their direction, not just one. Dominique van Wyk and Wesbank resident Shannon Pearce, who was 17 at the time of the shooting, said they also witnessed police shooting at Damian. Though Pearce’s name was known to investigators, her statement was not taken at the time. Viewfinder traced and interviewed her last year.

In her statement to investigators, Damian’s sister Donnecia Ahrendse said her dying brother had told her that “the police” had shot him after he collapsed on Etona Street. In fact, she said that Damian had identified Thebus as the shooter and later explained that Damian was familiar with Thebus.

A reconstruction of the events surrounding Damian Ahrendse’s death, including the two versions of the police shooting which were contained in IPID’s case file. (Animation: Viewfinder)

Watchdog investigation

The day after Damian died, IPID’s investigators went out to the scene in Wesbank and interviewed Andrew Konna. They did not retrieve the bullet that killed Damian, and IPID’s investigators appear not to have looked for blood splatters where witnesses believed he had been hit.

Then IPID’s investigation appears to have gone cold for several weeks over the festive season. IPID only formally registered the case a month after Damian’s killing. Most of the witnesses were only interviewed then, and photographs of the scene were taken 41 days after the shooting. It took IPID’s investigator eleven months to seize Thebus’s firearm for testing.

A photograph from IPID’s investigation of the scene where witnesses said police had fired at Damian. The photo was taken nearly six weeks after Damian’s death. (Source: IPID case file)

A previous Viewfinder exposé revealed poor investigative practices at IPID. When queried about these delays and observations in IPID’s investigation of Damian’s case, IPID’s head in the Western Cape Thabo Leholo maintained that “no IPID regulations were flouted” and that the crime scene had been properly “reconstructed”.

Though the investigation was imperfect and the evidence circumstantial, IPID’s investigator Happyboy Gigi still believed Thebus had a “prima facie case of murder” to answer for.

“The force he used was unnecessary and unjustifiable under the circumstances. There is no evidence that his life or that of his partner was in danger at the time,” he wrote.

In 2014, IPID referred the docket to a criminal prosecutor, who declined to prosecute Thebus and instead referred the case for an inquest the following year. Six years later, the inquest into Damian’s death has not been finalised. Leholo explained that IPID was “still attending outstanding magistrate’s instructions” before an inquest could go ahead.

In 2014, IPID also recommended that SAPS “initiate disciplinary proceedings” against Thebus on several charges of misconduct for the killing of Damian Ahrendse.

SAPS’s disciplinary system

In South Africa, police discipline management depends on senior officers internally appointed by SAPS to investigate, lead evidence and preside over hearings in which their colleagues are accused of misconduct.

SAPS must initiate a disciplinary process when IPID completes an investigation and recommends an officer be charged with misconduct. This is so, even if its officials disagree with the watchdog’s findings against their colleagues. If a case progresses to a hearing, the SAPS officials appointed as “employer representatives” have wide powers over how the evidence from IPID case files is interpreted and presented, and thus over the outcomes of these hearings: “guilty” or “not guilty”. The police watchdog is excluded from this hearing.

This means that police accountability in the country pivots on the preparedness and impartiality of these officials. Yet, they are exempt from external checks and balances. If these officials are unprepared or choose to skew the available evidence in favour of an accused colleague, a “not guilty” finding is nearly inevitable.

Viewfinder has previously unpacked the consequences of this in an exposé on SAPS’s discipline management system. Our investigation showed that disciplinary proceedings were vulnerable to manipulation within SAPS, and that this needed to be taken into account in light of how often police officers emerged from these proceedings unpunished or with low sanctions upon conviction for serious offences.

Yet, the inner workings of these proceedings — and the conduct of SAPS’s evidence leaders — remain hidden from view. The tapes of Lieutenant Michael Thebus’s disciplinary hearing have provided rare insight into the proceedings from which even watchdog investigators are routinely excluded.

The disciplinary hearing of Lieutenant Michael Thebus

In the disciplinary case against Lieutenant Michael Thebus, SAPS appointed Captain Gerhard van den Bergh as the “employer representative”. He was tasked with calling witnesses and leading evidence.

Former SAPS Captain Gerhard van den Bergh (source: Facebook)

Shannon Pearce, Donnecia Ahrendse and Andrew Konna were not called to testify, though Viewfinder has established that they were willing to do so. Konna has since passed away, though Viewfinder spoke to his stepfather, who said that Konna was willing to take the stand against Thebus.

All three of these witnesses had implicated a police officer in shooting Damian. These witnesses also had information important to the case: what Damian was wearing on the day that he was shot.

There is little doubt that Damian was wearing a jacket. This jacket was, at least in part, black and red. Konna had said this in his statement. Thebus and Groenewald both described the clothing Damian had on after he was shot as “a brown T-shirt and a black jacket with a red stripe and white on the bottom”.

When interviewed recently, witnesses Pearce, Donnecia Ahrendse, Dominique van Wyk and Damian’s mother Klarina Reed all agreed that these descriptions were of the Manchester United jacket that Damian had on when he was shot. Reed has kept this jacket as a memento and can point out the holes that the bullet apparently made as it passed through Damian’s torso.

The jacket that Damian Ahrendse had on when he was shot, according to his family. (photo: Daneel Knoetze)

When Van den Bergh questioned Thebus at his disciplinary hearing, the issue of Damian’s clothing came up. The exchange below has been translated from Afrikaans and edited for clarity.

“Both of them had red tops or t-shirts on,” Thebus had said, when asked what the suspect upon whom he had fired was wearing.

“Now are we talking about red or brown?” Van den Bergh asked.

“Red,” said Thebus.

“But, the deceased had a brown t-shirt on,” Van den Bergh said. Van den Bergh did not mention that Damian was also wearing a black and red jacket.

“According to me it was brown,” Thebus confirmed. At this moment during his testimony Thebus also did not mention that Damian was wearing a black and red jacket. This created the impression that there was a substantial difference between the clothing Damian was wearing (brown) and the clothing that the suspect upon whom Thebus had fired was wearing (red).

“And the difference between red and brown?” asked Van den Bergh.

“Yes, there was a difference,” Thebus said.

“So what you are actually telling us at the moment, is that there is a possibility that this chap that died was never even on the scene,” Van den Bergh said.

“When we saw the little guy lying there, I was absolutely convinced. I said to my colleague: ‘this is not the same guy,’” Thebus said.

This exchange between Lieutenant Michael Thebus and Captain Gerhard van den Bergh is contained in a segment produced by Viewfinder for Carte Blanche. The segment aired on 8 August 2020 and is accessible to DStv subscribers via Carte Blanche’s catch-up service here.

Viewfinder sent a query to Van den Bergh, who is no longer employed with SAPS, asking about the absence of certain witnesses from the hearing, his failure to mention Damian’s jacket during this exchange and questioning other instances where his leading of evidence appeared to support his colleagues’ claim to innocence. Viewfinder shared the case file and recordings with him, and asked for an interview or a response.

“I shall try to make time to study the material and listen to the records, but it will take some time,” he wrote via WhatsApp, while defending his track record as a discipline official who had apparently ensured the dismissal of over 200 corrupt cops over his career. He did not respond to a follow-up request a few days later.

In the absence of the other witnesses, Damian’s half-brother Dominique van Wyk was the only witness at the police hearing who testified that Thebus had shot at Damian. Van Wyk’s affiliation to the 26 Numbers gang meant that the credibility of his testimony was thrown into question.

During his closing statement in the hearing, Van den Bergh said that SAPS had accepted Thebus’s version and his claim to innocence in Damian Ahrendse’s killing. Even if Thebus had shot Damian, Van den Bergh said, he would have been justified in doing so. Van den Bergh did not fully explain why he believed such a shot would have been justified. The information available to him was that Damian had been shot in the back.

In his closing statement, Van den Bergh went on speculate about Damian Ahrendse’s character:

“When [Van Wyk] testifies that his 15-year-old brother used dagga, we have to ask the question: ‘Where to was he then on his way in life?’”

The life of Damian Ahrendse

On 17 December 2013, Damian Ahrendse’s body was laid out on an autopsy table at Tygerberg Mortuary. On his wrist, the pathologist noted, were three rubber bracelets: one yellow, one green and one red. These are the colours of Rastafarianism. The yellow represents the mineral wealth of Africa. The green represents the beauty and vegetation of the promised land, Ethiopia. The red represents the blood of martyrs in the struggle for black liberation around the world.

Damian was born into a world, on the Cape Flats, in which bloodshed was a fact of life for coloured boys and young men. In the year that Damian was born, his half-brother Dominique Van Wyk dropped out of school at the age of twelve. Through Damian’s adolescence, Van Wyk rose steadily through the ranks of Wesbank’s street gangs and then, in prison, he was inducted into the 26 Numbers gang.

Reed did not want Damian to be caught up in Wesbank’s gang fighting because of Dominique, so she sent him away to live with her sister in Kraaifontein. It was from here that he returned to his mother’s house on the day that he died.

In the philosophy of Rastafarianism and in his love for soccer, Reed says, Damian found a way to escape the long shadow that his brother’s increasing prominence in the Numbers and Wesbank’s affiliated street gangs had cast over the family. At 15, he was coming into his own. He would come back to Wesbank on Friday after school full of new stories and experiences from the week. He would wait for his mother at the taxi rank and they would walk home together.

Damian Ahrendse’s mother said that he was forging his identity in Rastafarianism during his teenage years (photo: Anton Scholtz)

“He told me one day he wants to play for Liverpool, and I said to him, ‘Yes, my child, that is your dream, you can achieve it. I think you will end up there, don’t worry. It’s like the other stars in the Springboks that end up overseas. So you will also end up overseas, I think. You said Liverpool is your team,’” Reed recalls one such interaction with her son.

“Don’t worry mommy. I will work for you when I grow up,” Reed recalls him saying, when she despaired about Van Wyk’s gang activities and about the poverty that has remained a constant in her life.

When Damian was killed, she knew that the fight for justice would be a fight against the stigma of the connection with a top gangster. So she went door to door gathering signatures on a petition to confirm that Damian had “no involvement in gangsterism”.

Reed gathered 76 signatures. The petition became the basis for the file that she has carried with her ever since – on visits to IPID, to Kuilsriver Magistrate’s Court and uncounted trips into the Cape Town city centre in search of an organisation or government office where officials would listen to her. It was the file with which Reed first walked into Viewfinder and GroundUp’s offices in January 2020.

A soccer trophy awarded to Damian in 2008. (photo: Anton Scholtz)

The file also contained a photo of the deceased Damian with a bullet wound to his chest, a birth certificate, a death certificate, a photo of Damian on a school trip and a diploma of merit that confirmed that he was a top goal scorer at Wesbank Super Eagles Football Club in 2008. This is all that remains of Damian’s short life. This and his mother’s memory of him.

“There are times that I’ll go to the grave site. Then I speak to him and say ‘Damian, you might just come tell mommy. What, what did go wrong that day?’” Reed said.

“The Death of Damian Ahrendse”, a documentary short produced by Viewfinder which revisists the day that Damian died.

Viewfinder submitted a detailed query to SAPS Western Cape and SAPS head office, which included a request to interview Michael Thebus and Adriaan Groenewald. SAPS head office did not respond. SAPS Western Cape spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel André Traut said that the police could not make its employees available for an interview and declined to answer questions about the disciplinary hearing because it referred to an “internal” process.

This article forms part of an ongoing investigation of police brutality and non-accountability in South Africa. It was funded, in part, by the Henry Nxumalo Fund for Investigative Reporting.

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Video: The Death of Damian Ahrendse

Viewfinder — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 21:32:08 +0000

On a Friday evening in December 2013, at the start of the school holidays, 15-year-old Damian Ahrendse was shot and killed near his mother’s house in Wesbank, on the Cape Flats. Witnesses say that a police officer pulled the trigger. An autopsy report concluded that Damian had been shot in the back. Yet, the policeman implicated in the shooting walked out of his disciplinary hearing unpunished. Why?

With unprecedented access to the tapes from this hearing, Viewfinder put our ongoing investigation’s findings to the test: can these proceedings be manipulated to protect brutality accused officers from consequence? Our latest exposé is out soon. Meanwhile, this short film introduces you to Damian Ahrendse’s mother, Klarina Reed, and her recollections of the day that her son died.

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Cops who rape are rarely disciplined, watchdog data reveals. Many stay on the job.

Viewfinder — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 01:43:00 +0000

Policemen have been accused of nearly 1,000 rapes since 2012. Many of these suspects stand accused of abusing the authority of their positions to aid them in these crimes, a new investigation by Viewfinder has found. Yet, police management rarely disciplines or dismisses the officers involved.

On the afternoon of 6 June 2014, 36-year-old Ermelo police Warrant Officer Sipho* was sitting alone in a white bakkie on a quiet stretch of the N2 highway in south-eastern Mpumalanga. Through his windshield, Sipho spotted 17-year-old schoolgirl Lerato* walking towards him.

The details of what happened next were later captured in Lerato’s statement to investigators. She was there to catch a taxi home, as she usually did on Fridays after school, she said. Sipho leaned on his hooter to catch her attention. At first she ignored him. When she eventually looked up, Sipho was standing next to the car. He was wearing a uniform: blue pants and a blue shirt, with a police jersey pulled over it. There was a blue light flashing on the bakkie’s dashboard, she recalled.

Lerato said Sipho walked over and informed her that she was under arrest on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant from Swaziland – the border was within a short distance from the road. He ordered her into the front seat. Frightened, not knowing what to do, she obliged.

Warrant Officer Sipho then drove off with the teenager. He pulled off to a gravel road beside the highway.

“He told me he is taking me to Johannesburg, where I would be raped by more than 15 African males. And, (he) got out and opened my door. He then grabbed my legs and pulled them towards the side where he was standing. He then told me to undress and I refused… I tried to resist, but he told me that he would assault me,” Lerato told investigators.

Sipho then raped her.

Afterwards, Sipho drove Lerato back to the spot where he had abducted her. He made small talk – telling her that his shift was over and that he was headed to Durban. Lerato’s taxi fare of R30 and cellphone had fallen from her pockets during the rape. He gave these to her, and then he drove off.

Lerato used her cellphone to record the police bakkie’s licence plate number. In tears, she sent a “please call me” to her older brother. He called back and instructed her to catch a lift to a police station to report the case, which she did.

Three days later, Sipho’s police colleagues arrested and detained him at Piet Retief police station. On the fourth day, Lerato came face-to-face with her rapist once again. This time, she walked up to pick him out of an identity parade. A little over a year later, Sipho was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. The magistrate ordered that he be placed on the National Register of Sex Offenders.

A check with the Department of Correctional Services’ (DCS) spokesperson Singabakho Nxumalo established that Sipho spent only three nights in prison before he was released on bail, pending an appeal. Neither the DCS nor the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) in Mpumalanga could say whether the appeal was successful. But, it appeared that Sipho never returned to prison, Nxumalo said.

In South Africa, police officers are accused of thousands of violent crimes every year. Among them, rape and sexual assaults account for some of the most serious and opportunistic abuses of power by police in the country. And, Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) data suggests that they routinely get away with it.

Since 2012, IPID has registered nearly a thousand rape cases against on- and off-duty police officers. More than a third of these are against police officers who were “on-duty” at the time that they apparently committed their crimes.

With each case that IPID registers, a complaint description is taken down, usually from the statements of people who say they experienced abuses by police officers. From the database, Viewfinder isolated 220 rape complaints registered against “on-duty” police officers across the country between April 2015 and March 2020 – the most recent five-year period for which audited data is available. These descriptions consistently pointed to cases where police officers stand accused of abusing the power, trust or privilege of their position in order to commit rape – as Warrant Officer Sipho did when he abducted and raped Lerato.

In 38 of the complaints in Viewfinder’s sample, women said that they were raped while in custody or under arrest. In 26 of the cases, the victim of an alleged rape was a minor. In some of the descriptions, patrolling on-duty police officers reportedly rolled up to women walking alone on the streets at night. They offered to give these women lifts home, but instead drove to secluded areas to rape them.

A previous Viewfinder article highlighted the case of police officers accused of gang raping a woman who had called on them for protection from an abusive partner in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Viewfinder’s sample has now revealed 13 other examples of officers accused of raping women and girls who had called on the police or been entrusted to them for help.

In January 2017, a police officer from Zamdela in the Free State visited a domestic abuse survivor to see how she was “coping” after the arrest of her husband. He ended up overpowering and raping her on her bed, the woman later reported to IPID.

In August 2016, a 55-year-old Warrant Officer was accused of raping a 15-year-old girl inside the trauma room of Montagu police station, in the Western Cape. The complaint does not expand on why the girl was there, but police station trauma rooms are designated safe spaces for people who have experienced violence or other traumatic events.

In September 2016, two patrolling police officers offered a student walking in the Cape Town city centre late at night a lift back to her residence. Instead, according to IPID’s complaint description, they drove her to an “unknown” location and raped her. The woman eventually refused to pursue the case and the file was closed, IPID reported.

With a total of 73 cases, IPID’s Western Cape office registered the highest number of rape cases against “on duty” police officers in the country, between 2012 and 2020, (the latest years for which audited figures are available). Thabo Leholo, IPID’s head in the province, said that the abuse of power is the common thread that runs through these rape cases as well. Though alleged rapes account for a small fraction of IPID’s case load, compared to the hundreds of police assaults registered annually in the Western Cape for instance, Leholo says that these cases are prioritised and assigned to the most experienced case workers on his team.

“Yes, some of these rape cases derive from opportunism, because of the power that the police have and the abuse that they are able to mete out against the powerless – people who are in their custody or people who have come to them,” said Leholo.

The watchdog’s data suggests that – in spite of its “prioritisation” of rape investigations – as much as 97% of police officers investigated for rape are not convicted in court and imprisoned.

One reason for the low rates of criminal convictions, said Leholo, is delays in technical reports which are needed before dockets can be successfully prosecuted. These delays affect the criminal justice system as a whole. Earlier this year, police minister Bheki Cele announced a backlog at the country’s Forensic Sciences Laboratories of more than 200,000 cases. More than 77,000 of these were gender-based violence and femicide cases that were otherwise ready for court.

But these delays need not mean that police officers implicated in these crimes must remain “on duty”. The South African Police Service (SAPS) discipline regulations define rape as a form of serious misconduct and empower the police to suspend and dismiss officers following disciplinary proceedings. The burden of proof for obtaining a conviction in these proceedings is considerably lower than in criminal courts.

Yet, for the 964 rape cases registered against police officers between April 2012 and March 2020, SAPS only dismissed 50 officers for rape.

Earlier this year, IPID pointed out to Parliament that there was widespread disregard within SAPS for its findings and recommendations against police officers implicated in violent crimes. Though SAPS is legally obliged to initiate departmental proceedings against police officers recommended for discipline, IPID reported that this did not happen in over half of the disciplinary recommendations cases forwarded to the police in 2020/21. In the case of rape, only three of 30 recommendations led to SAPS convicting officers in disciplinary hearings at the close of the financial year.

Though IPID’s investigation of Sipho’s actions led to a court conviction, it appears that it did not result in internal disciplinary action against him. A month after he was accused of raping Lerato, IPID recommended to the police that disciplinary proceedings be initiated. According to IPID, SAPS reported back that it had initiated an “investigation”. Then, silence. IPID did not report any further progress in the disciplinary process. Right up to the moment when he was convicted and sentenced to prison, the status of the recommendation was stalled at: “awaiting response”.

In response to queries this week, Mpumalanga SAPS spokesperson Colonel Donald Mdhluli declined to comment, saying that discipline was a “private matter” between the employer and the employee.

*The real name of Sipho, the police officer, cannot be used for legal reasons. The real name of Lerato, the rape survivor, has been withheld at her request.

This article forms part of an ongoing investigation of police brutality and non-accountability in South Africa. It was funded, in part, by the Henry Nxumalo Fund for Investigative Reporting.

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Video: The Death of Ishmael Gama

Viewfinder — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 04:33:00 +0000

On 1 April 2020, Ishmael Gama was reportedly tortured and killed by police officers in Lenasia, south of Johannesburg. More than a year after his death, and months after the police watchdog implicated eight officers in murder, police management has not acted. But, this is not an unusual scenario. A new Viewfinder analysis of police brutality case data suggests that police management in Gauteng has entirely stopped disciplining officers implicated in killings and brutality in the province. Link to the full story here.

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#VukaniMaAfrika: Engagement call on police brutality launches in partnership with Eldos FM

Viewfinder — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 08:49:34 +0000

Next month it will be one year since 16-year-old Nathaniel Julies was killed in Eldorado Park. Three police officers, charged variously with murder and accessory to murder, are due to stand trial for Julies’ killing later this year.

Julies’ killing sparked protests in Eldorado Park, which only prompted more police brutality, say the township’s residents. At the time of the global Black Lives Matter movement, the killing of Julies brought unprecedented attention to the issue of police brutality and non-accountability in South Africa.

Viewfinder’s investigation of this issue is rooted in the Independent Police Investigative Directorate’s (IPID) case intake data for police stations across South Africa. For us, a close reading of these data have confirmed the issue of police brutality and non-accountability centres in poor, black communities.

Our recent exposé explored how police management in Gauteng fails to hold problem officers in the province accountable. From the data, we have now isolated a cluster of the province’s police stations south of Johannesburg: Eldorado Park, Ennerdale, Kliptown, Lenasia and Lenasia South. Across these areas, IPID registered 30 killings, 18 deaths in custody, more than 170 assault cases and 46 shootings by police between April 2012 and March 2020. Only three cases led to officers being disciplined, and none of them lost their jobs.

It’s against this backdrop that Viewfinder has partnered with Eldos FM – the area’s community radio station – to issue a call to action and engagement in communities most affected by police brutality. Under the title of #VukaniMaAfrika, the call asks South Africans, especially those living in areas which experience police abuses, to share their experiences, to ask questions and to demand accountability from their local station commanders. The collaboration with Eldos FM is the pilot phase for this campaign.

“They (SAPS) need to realize that it’s a new day, and the way they are treating their own, shows there’s been no culture change since apartheid. They need to have a culture shift at police stations, that’s the conversation that needs to happen,” said Lorreal De Lange, the station manager who is spearheading the partnership for Eldos FM.

De Lange admits that a culture of fear of the police in Eldorado Park stops victims from speaking out or pursuing justice.

“It’s very close to home and we are scared. But at the same time it’s also necessary to expose this kind of information, it’s more necessary for us to do it than to listen to our fear.”

Tunicia Jegels grew up in Eldorado Park and is a director on Eldos FM’s board. She is writing a book about Julies’ death, as well as police abuses more generally. She says communities like Eldorado Park are targeted by SAPS and it’s common for residents to experience police brutality from a young age. She recalls how, as an 18-year-old, she was assaulted by a female police officer in Eldorado Park, who falsely accused her and her friends of drinking in a car.

“It was just so abusive, unnecessary and such an over exertion of authority; that was my first encounter with police in Eldos and it was very traumatizing,” she says, adding that in the months following Julies’ killing, it appears to be business as usual for the police in Eldorado Park.

“Eldos has also become a place where (community) stakeholders are really trying to work with SAPS – to look for the good apples within SAPS, and also know that SAPS has the power of being dangerous and being forced to sometimes turn a blind eye. That’s the reality in which everybody operates in – an atmosphere of fear with SAPS. But it’s also so critical that SAPS has a relationship with strong organisations (in the community).”

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Gauteng police have killed hundreds, but SAPS leave brutal cops unchecked

Viewfinder — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 12:15:45 +0000

During the first week of Covid-19 lockdown last year, Ishmael Gama died in custody at Lenasia police station. In March, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) recommended that police management discipline eight officers implicated in Gama’s torture and killing. Months later, the police are yet to do so. Gama’s case is typical in Gauteng, where police have reportedly killed more than 900 people since 2012. A new analysis of watchdog statistics suggests that Gauteng police management have stopped disciplining officers implicated in violent crimes altogether.

At around midnight on 31 March 2020 police officers caught two men stripping car parts at a vehicle pound in Lenasia, south of Johannesburg. The officers tied the pair up, made them lie down inside a security hut and started boiling a kettle of water, recalled Themba Mdluli, one of the men interviewed by Viewfinder last year.

Then, he said, the officers poured the contents of the kettle over him and his friend, Ishmael Gama. Then the officers refilled the kettle and repeated the routine. Over the next few hours, the police beat the two continuously, Mdluli said.

The torture apparently broke the two men – they gave up the names of others whom they said had stolen car parts from the pound in the past. For the police, this was a lead worth pursuing. As the sun rose the next morning, the police drove Gama and Mdluli into Thembelihle informal settlement to search for the others. There the police found and arrested Neville Nyandeni, 36, and drove them all back to the pound.

“They hit us with pipes, every police officer that got there would join in on the beating,” said Nyandeni.

“We tried to crawl under the cars to hide. They’d pull us out and beat us even more … from 9:00am till 1:00pm, the whole time. Ishmael couldn’t even walk. He couldn’t do anything. They didn’t care, and they didn’t even give us water, that whole time.”

Nyandeni apparently led police to a chop shop where stolen car parts from the pound could be found. The police raided the place and later piled up the recovered loot back at the pound. They called Cannedy Netshitungulu, a reporter from Rising Sun Lenasia community newspaper. The photos Netshitungulu took on the day show the pile of car parts and the suspects arrested by police. In one of the photos, a man lies face down on the tarmac – barefoot except for one tattered sock. That was Ishmael Gama, according to his older sister Thembi Nkosi, who identified him by his clothes.

During a phone call, Netshitungulu said that he had no idea that Gama was seriously wounded at the time. The Rising Sun’s caption on the arrests, under the headline “Lockdown, Lock up”, simply said the police had “followed a lead” to recover “motorcycles, tyres, radiators, car batteries and a homemade firearm”. Six suspects were behind bars as the “investigation” continued.

Later that day, at the police station’s charge office, Gama spoke to his friend Mdluli for the last time as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Nyandeni recalls that Gama’s eyes were rolling back in his head. Gama asked Mdluli to bear witness to his death.

“Themba, I am dying. I want to die in front of you,” he said, according to Mdluli.

Nyandeni recalls that a police officer – a “captain”, he says – scoffed when he pleaded for an ambulance for Gama. Then, a police officer led Mdluli and Nyandeni to the cells. They were told to leave Gama behind. There, Gama died.

The Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) reported the case to Parliament as one of the killings by police related to the Covid-19 lockdown. In March this year, IPID recommended that eight police officers be disciplined for their alleged involvement in Gama’s killing. Fifteen weeks later this has not happened, according to IPID.

Assault, torture and killings pervasive, but police not arrested

Of the nine provinces, Gauteng’s IPID office registers some of the highest numbers of deaths in custody and assault cases against the police. Police in the province have reportedly killed more than 900 people since 2012. In recent months Johannesburg, particularly the townships to the south of the city, has provided the backdrop for a number of high profile cases.

In August 2020, disabled teenager Nathaniel Julies was fatally shot, allegedly by a police officer, in Eldorado Park. In November, the Palm Ridge Magistrates Court sentenced two police officers to 18 years imprisonment for torturing 43-year-old Innocent Sebediela to death in Ennerdale in 2018. In March, IPID arrested eight police officers for allegedly torturing a suspect to death at Protea Glen police station. Also in March, Mthokozisi Ntumba was shot and killed, allegedly by a police officer, during a student protest in Braamfontein.

A review of IPID’s case data for Gauteng and an interview with a Johannesburg-based attorney who represents police torture victims suggests that a significant proportion of police officers use – or at least accept – violence when interrogating detainees. In Gama’s case, the fact that police invited a journalist to the scene where a man lay dying from injuries that they had apparently inflicted on him probably reflects this acceptance.

Complaints of severe assaults and torture in custody are common in the more than 7,000 cases that IPID has registered in the province between 2012 and 2020. Viewfinder has read the complaint descriptions for many of these cases.

Peter Jordi, an associate professor and the head at the Wits University Law Clinic, has represented police torture victims in civil suits against the police for around 30 years.

“When I started with these kinds of cases, torture seemed to be used by the more specialised units,” he said, singling out the now defunct Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit.

“But it seems to have spread more widely.”

Jordi now represents Themba Mdluli and Thembi Nkosi – Ishmael Gama’s sister. They are suing the minister of police for damages. Even if they are successful it will not necessarily mean that the officers accused in Gama’s killing will be held accountable. Civil claims are settled by SAPS as a department, often without consequences for the officers whose actions resulted in a lawsuit.

In all the high-profile cases from recent months mentioned above, police officers were arrested. But, this gives a skewed impression. Available data from recent years (IPID did not publish arrests data in 2018/19) suggests that the police watchdog makes fewer than three arrests for every 100 cases it registers in Gauteng.

Has Gauteng SAPS stopped disciplining cops who torture and kill?

Yet, the low number of arrests is eclipsed by another statistic from IPID in the province. Between April 2016 and March 2020 (the most recent month for which audited statistics are available), IPID has not reported on SAPS disciplining a single police officer implicated in a violent crime. This is in spite of more than 300 IPID disciplinary recommendations against police officers for offences ranging from shootings, torture, assault and rape; and, more than 50 recommendations that SAPS discipline officers for killings and deaths in custody.

Viewfinder has previously reported on SAPS’s apparent contempt for watchdog findings and recommendations against its own officers. Yet, these statistics from Gauteng – that no officers have been disciplined for violent crimes between 2016 and 2020 – appear to be too outlandish to be true. Viewfinder contacted IPID’s spokesperson Ndileka Cola, compliance monitoring head Mariaan Geerdts and SAPS spokesman Captain Kay Makhubele for clarification. They all failed to respond to the query.

In Viewfinder’s experience, SAPS rarely responds to questions about killings, brutality or misconduct by its members or police management’s usual failure to act against officers implicated in these crimes. When station commanders are confronted with killings by police that have apparently happened under their watch, they are likely to refer queries to provincial spokespeople.

This is what Lenasia station commander Brigadier YP Baloyi did when asked whether his office investigated or took any action against subordinates accused in Gama’s killing. SAPS provincial spokespeople routinely refer queries to IPID. IPID’s spokesperson rarely responds.

This loop of referral and silence conceals a deep, nationwide disagreement between SAPS management and IPID’s senior officials.

“The fact that we investigate the police does not excuse police management from doing their management function, which is to take action against their members when they become aware of misconduct,” said one senior IPID official, quoted anonymously here because they were speaking without an official mandate. Viewfinder is aware that this view is held by other senior IPID officials, as well.

But, SAPS commanders and management see things differently. Their spokespeople often contend that the police must wait for IPID’s recommendations before SAPS can act against implicated officers. Viewfinder’s investigation has previously revealed that, even so, SAPS rarely disciplines officers with recommendations against them.

So problem officers, like those accused of torturing and killing Ishmael Gama, usually remain on duty – both when a case is registered and when the watchdog makes negative findings against them.

Reflections on the death of Ishmael Gama

The families and friends of people killed by police often have not studied the data or the details of the disagreements between IPID officials and police management. Ishmael Gama’s sister Thembi Nkosi knows only that she was turned away when she arrived at Lenasia police station to ask whether the station commander had dealt with the men accused of beating her brother to death.

“I’m still traumatised because of what happened to us,” said Nyandeni.

“What the police did is totally wrong, because they are the people that are supposed to help us. But, they are the ones who kill us. Since this whole thing happened, nothing has been done. They killed my friend right in front of me.”

When South Africa’s first lockdown was enforced, Gama lost his part-time job at a catering company. This, Nkosi believes, is what drove her brother to steal car parts at the pound on the night before he died. Though he struggled with addiction, he remained a good son and provided for his mother, she says.

“The station commander has never set foot in this house to discuss this case,” said Maria Gama, Ishmael and Thembi’s mother, during an interview at her house in Lenasia. She is frail and sickly.

“They are enjoying themselves in their houses, drinking tea with milk and sugar, what am I drinking? I also want a comfortable life. That is what Ishmael gave me. It was enough for me, even if it wasn’t much, he would make sure we sleep with food on the table. Right now I don’t have anything.”

Additional reporting: Ihsaan Haffejee

This article forms part of an ongoing investigation of police brutality and non-accountability in South Africa. It was funded, in part, by the Henry Nxumalo Fund for Investigative Reporting.

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