A Samwu shop steward has stuck his neck out in an open letter, calling for a purge of the metro police department of senior officers.
|||KwaZulu-Natal - A South African Municipal Workers Union shop steward has stuck his neck out in an open letter to the eThekwini municipality mayor calling for a purge of the metro police department of senior officers.
He alleges in the letter that they come to work intoxicated on drugs and alcohol, indulge in free brothel services, sexually harass junior staff and pay bribes for promotions.
Mayor James Nxumalo’s spokesman, Thabo Mofokeng, confirmed yesterday that the mayor had received the letter from the shop steward, Nhlanhla Madikizela, and was addressing “the issue of leadership” in the force.
A copy of the controversial letter, which is littered with allegations of a “virus of corruption” that needs “medication” urging the mayor to “correct the shepherd” in reference to police chief Eugene Nzama and “the sheep will automatically get corrected”, was leaked to The Independent last Saturday.
Madikizela said in the letter that metro police had “learned bad habits” after taking their demands for management to fight alleged corruption, remove Nzama and make contract workers permanent employees, to the street in protests last year.
“We need to agree that there is a virus at metro police. It gets generated from the top structure, spreading down to the rank and file. Let us identify the character of the virus and prescribe a relevant drug and jointly administer it,” Madikizela said. “Once the virus is dead, it will have to be flushed out of the system of this police force and we will apply therapy to the patients,” Madikizela said.
He listed more than a dozen allegations against senior metro police officers and management, including sexual harassment of subordinates, a cover-up of an accident involving a senior policeman in which a child was run over, drug and brothel abuse and corruption in the outsourcing of police services.
“We cannot ensure that members are not corrupt and (don’t) take bribes from the road when during their recruitment they had to pay some people at HR in order to be employed. You cannot tell members to stop taking bribes when some of their commanders take bribes from special event organisers,” Madikizela said.
“You cannot tell members to come to work free from alcohol when their commanders smoke dagga and even come to meetings high on intoxicating substances and try to bully union members who are sober.
“How can members become disciplined if senior officers are on the control by Escort Agencies where they indulge themselves in free services of brothels and members are aware of that,” Madikizela asked?
He added that senior officers deployed members at special events depending on how much the organisers had given in “sweeteners”.
“Disciplinary procedure and promotional procedure is full of corruption. People pay to have cases against them go away, and people pay so they get promoted,” Madikizela said. “Entry requirements to the force are deliberately made difficult for the purposes of increasing the bribe for recruiters.”
Madikizela likened the way contract workers had been treated to the persecution of the Jews in World War 2, black people under apartheid and Afrikaners in Anglo Boer War concentration camps.
He thanked the mayor and municipal manager Sbusiso Sithole for making 100 police officers permanent after they had allegedly worked for six years on contract.
Asked to respond to the allegations, Mofokeng said: “The mayor and the city manager are still studying the contents of the letter, which was sent in confidence to the office of the mayor, and will respond accordingly once they have applied their minds on the matter.”
However, he added that “some of the items mentioned in the letter are already in the process of being addressed as part of our efforts to maintain stability and professionalism within the metro police unit, including the issue of leadership.”
Nhlanhla could not be reached for comment yesterday. However, Samwu spokesman Jaycee Ncanana said members needed immediate answers.
“With regard to the letter we are very concerned about the allegations in so far as the corruption is concerned that is taking place within the council. There are many strange things happening in the council and we want the council to operate transparently and that is not happening right now,” Ncanana said. “People should be treated the same if they belong to the same payroll. There should be no favours.”
Independent on Saturday