Former South African Police Service (SAPS) administration clerk Patricia Mashale last month briefly told Parliament during an online meeting that she was in hiding because she has feared for her life since exposing high-level cop corruption.

The SAPS hit back via a presentation, dated that same day, 30 November, claiming that Mashale was actually a member of a group running a social media campaign to discredit its top bosses and that she had a dodgy work history.

Mashale, who recently won an international award for whistle-blowing, has not taken this lying down.

On Friday, 9 December, Mary de Haas, a violence monitor and analyst who is representing Mashale, wrote to Parliament’s Speaker.

De Haas said national Police Commissioner Fannie Masemola, who is responsible for the SAPS presentation about Mashale, needs to be held to account for “untruths” being spread about her.

‘Charge top cop with perjury’

“The SAPS presentation can be challenged on a number of grounds but, most serious of all, is that it includes blatant untruths one of which defames Mrs Mashale,” De Haas’s letter, which has not yet been discussed in Parliament, but which Daily Maverick has seen, said.

“I explain why I expect Parliament to charge National Commissioner Masemola with perjury, since we are aware that evidence to committees is [given] under oath.”

The situation around Mashale can be condensed as follows — she says she is a whistle-blower in hiding because of high-level police corruption she is exposing, while the SAPS says she is running a smear campaign, which De Haas, on behalf of Mashale, says is a lie.

De Haas and Mashale’s stance is that the SAPS is effectively running a campaign against Mashale.

These contradictory stances have not yet been fully discussed in Parliament but are linked to processes playing out there — it appears the SAPS is yet to respond to De Haas’s letter.

During the 30 November police committee meeting last month, a document from Mashale was briefly focused on.

It said: “I am a whistle-blower who reported massive corruption in Free State SAPS and suffered massive retaliation and occupation detriment following my protected disclosures to the former National Commissioner, General [Khehla Sitole].”

Sitole, who faces criminal accusations for allegedly not assisting with a critical Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) investigation, was made to step down from the country’s top-cop position earlier this year.

Threats

Mashale, in the document that was briefly shown in Parliament last month, said that despite the threats against her, she had not received assistance in terms of security from certain state entities.

This had resulted in her turning to Parliament.

De Haas, in her Friday letter to Parliament’s Speaker, said she had “been drawing to the attention of the Police Portfolio Committee the fact that Mrs Mashale’s life is in great danger from SAPS members since January 2022.”

It was expected the committee would interrogate this and perhaps call Mashale to a meeting with implicated police officers to present, under oath, their versions of what was happening.

De Haas said there had been a kidnapping or murder attempt on Mashale in early November and so she reminded Parliament’s police committee “of all my appeals to them to deal constructively with the threat.”

Shortly after this, De Haas said, she and Mashale were invited to make presentations to Parliament.

But this process did not go as they had expected.

Communication confusion

Daily Maverick previously reported that on 30 November, during the police committee meeting that Mashale and De Haas were part of virtually, they were told they had not followed the correct procedures to address Parliament.

The committee’s chairperson, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, had said a formal petition was meant to have been submitted to Parliament’s Speaker and it would then have been forwarded to the police committee, enabling Mashale and De Haas to address those present at the meeting.

In Friday’s letter to the Speaker, De Haas explained that this stance had confused her and Mashale.

“We had assumed that… since we had been invited without our having requested to make the presentation that the petition procedure would not apply,” De Haas said.

She and Mashale had also mistakenly thought that the petition Joemat- Pettersson referred to was an online one that Mashale was running, not a formal one to Parliament.

SAPS’s stance

Due to these issues, Mashale and De Haas were not allowed to make their formal planned presentations to the police committee on 30 November.

The SAPS, however, provided Parliament with a full presentation on its version of Mashale.

Daily Maverick reported on the SAPS presentation which claimed: “Ms Mashale is part of a group of people… who are driving a smear campaign on social media by spreading false, baseless, defamatory and unsubstantiated allegations against SAPS top management and the service.”

It also claimed she had been irregularly employed in the SAPS and “charged for failure to disclose her dishonourable discharge from the Department of Health where she was previously employed as well as irregular employment in the Service.”

The SAPS presentation further implicated Mashale’s husband George, saying he was once a police reservist who was dismissed in connection with alleged involvement in a corruption case dating to 2008.

This — the SAPS’s 30 November presentation on Mashale — is what De Haas focused on in her Friday letter to Parliament’s Speaker.

‘Lies under oath’

“General Masemola, who bears responsibility for the presentation, lied to Parliament under oath about Mrs Mashale, including her employment history,” De Haas wrote.

“I expect Parliament to charge him for perjury.”

In terms of Mashale’s “dishonourable discharge from the Department of Health” — as claimed in the SAPS presentation — De Haas wrote that a police general allegedly stole personal documents from Mashale, “including those showing she had resigned from the Department of Health.”

De Haas said that led to lies being spread about Mashale and alleged this resulted in “a malicious disciplinary hearing taking place in 2009.”

Charges that were brought against Mashale in the disciplinary included that she was dishonourably discharged from the Health Department.

‘She won the case’

It also related to her claimed irregular appointment into the SAPS.

“The disciplinary hearing took place, with generals testifying that normal procedures had been followed when she was appointed,” De Haas said.

“She won the case.”

Masemola, De Haas said, had signed off on the disciplinary procedure against Mashale.

In terms of Mashale’s husband George, De Haas said the corruption claims that SAPS made against him were also lies.

“It was he who reported corruption,” De Haas countered.

“He was maliciously arrested, and the Mashale home was searched without a warrant in what was obviously an attempt to find the incriminating evidence he had uncovered.”

She indicated there was a report from Ipid, which at that time was known as the Independent Complaints Directorate, exonerating George Mashale and it “reminds him that he has the option of a civil claim.”

‘Imagined’ smear campaign

The SAPS presentation about Mashale had said it was “unaware of any persecution” of her.

But De Haas, in Friday’s letter, said “it is pointed out in my [previous] letter to SAPS management sent in January 2022, and to Parliament, that her car with her children in it had been followed by police all the way from her minor son’s boarding school… in November 2021.”

De Haas added Mashale was not involved in a smear campaign.

“The assertion by the SAPS that there is some sort of conspiracy to ‘smear’ them is a figment of management’s imagination,” De Haas said.

“Leaving aside the plight of Mashale, I have masses of independent evidence about the abuse of the law by members of the SAPS, including malicious arrests, seizure of phones without orders, and torture and killings.”

De Haas wrote that she and Mashale would consider their options about petitioning the Speaker’s office to make a presentation to Parliament next year.

“I believe, from my own experience in researching and monitoring the SAPS spanning 30 years,” De Haas said, “that the SAPS, as currently constituted and managed, poses the biggest threat to the stability of SA.”

She said this had played a role in July 2021 — when there was an attempted insurrection that devastated parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

Daily Maverick previously reported that in June this year Parliament heard that the police commissioner at the time, Khehla Sitole, had not received any police Crime Intelligence reports ahead of that violence. DM