I wish to explore the latter issue, in the context of a police service struggling with its own identity, an inability to deliver the safety and security to which the public is entitled and the critical imperative of transformation.

On the one hand, we have the issue of how the SAPS handles social commentary from within its ranks, even if these are expressed in what some might perceive as harsh or uncomplimentary terms. 

The fundamental decision taken on the post-apartheid police service was to demilitarise it and establish in its place a service-oriented police organisation free of the militarised use of force, the rejection of a nonsensical culture of military discipline and disposing of the untouchable big man syndrome that characterised its leaders at all levels.

By all accounts and contrary to the repeated declarations of ANC leaders, ministers of police and police commissioners, this effort has failed dismally.

This is largely because its implementation has been sabotaged by those embedded both in the ruling ANC and the apartheid-era apparatchiks within SAPS who have attached themselves to ANC politicians attracted to the idea of militarisation, force and the personality cult. 

This phenomenon represents an example of the larger problem with the transformative project in South Africa: an ANC that is bereft of ideas, has lost its ability to imagine a better world and has failed to transform the state, society or government. 

Into this breach has stepped a coterie of apartheid-era police officers who have learnt to recite the language of the ANC without being committed to its transformative mission. 

For the government, the risk from this development is an increased alienation from the people, a rejection of the legitimacy of the police and its methods and the emergence of alternative non-state instruments of coercion and violence.

The effect of this, as far as the Vearey case is concerned, is both an intolerance of criticism and unconventional commentary, and a thin-skinned fear of defamation by people whose poor performance is by its very nature a defamation of the entire republic and its citizenry. 

Marx, in the essay, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, makes two simple yet profound statements, and the similarity of the Bonapartist coup in France with the unwinding of the ANC’s transformative policing strategy is aptly captured in these. 

First, he states that the work is intended to “demonstrate how the class struggle… created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” 

The problem with our national SAPS leadership is that it represents exactly this kind of mediocrity, and realising this themselves, they live in constant fear of those who might think differently and heaven forbid, speak and write about this. 

Having at their disposal, or rather having been placed in charge of the instruments of coercion by the ANC, they weaponise the rules, systems and procedures at their disposal to cover their thin skins and avoid the exposure of their abject performance in delivering security to the South African people.

Marx further states that “every giant… presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine… The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain.” 

This is the case of Vearey and the SAPS leadership encapsulated in simple terms.

On the other hand, it is an indisputable fact that the SAPS lacks the ability to craft a new strategic orientation and the capacity to innovate new forms of, and approaches to, policing. 

If we adopt, for a brief moment, the absurd proposition that Vearey offended the national commissioner of police, the response to his statements is, in the first instance, grossly out of proportion, but also a decisive blow against developing police capability through the expelling of one of its foremost strategic minds. 

Anyone who knows Vearey knows him as a thoughtful and deliberate thinker who has much to contribute to policing strategy and approaches. 

His achievements in building community and police cohesion in Mitchells Plain during his tenure as commissioner there, designing approaches that have led to the conviction of several high-profile gang leaders and his central role in uncovering the massive guns-to-gangs scheme run by apartheid-era police officers are the sort of achievements that need to be emulated, studied and integrated into strategy and doctrine. 

The expulsion of a key proponent of these ideas and practices sets the SAPS firmly back on the route to a police force of which Adriaan Vlok and Louis le Grange would be proud. DM