POLICE Minister Bheki Cele finally made it to the National Investigative Hearing into the July 2021 Civil Unrest, held under the aegis of the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) which concluded its KwaZulu-Natal leg on Friday that was held at the Gateway Hotel, uMhlanga.
He apologised for not honouring the call to be at the hearing on Monday as he was out of the country, first at the Interpol general Assembly in Turkey and then in Nigeria accompanying President Cyril Ramaphosa on the first leg of his four-day west African tour.
The hearings, which began on November 15, will now move to Gauteng from February 2022, with the purpose to establishing the causes of the violent looting that engulfed the two provinces, and parts of Mpumalanga.
During the fracas, over 30 people were killed in what is now known as the Phoenix Massacre, while around 350 people lost their lives countrywide.
From his opening statement alone, Minister Cele did not have one word of doubt about the role and efficacy of the police, whose conduct came under fire throughout the testimony of previous witnesses.
If people did not complain about the conspicuous absence of the police at flash points, it was their lack of resources, like water canons and rubber bullets.
Minister Cele stopped short of giving awards to the police for their role during the July unrest. He did say, though, that some mall owners in KZN heaped praise and bestowed awards on the men and women in blue!
Minister Cele began his opening statement outlining the talks at the Nkandla compound of former President Jacob Zuma to convince him to hand himself over to a Correctional Services facility to begin serving his 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
From that time until Zuma finally relented and went to report at the Estcourt jail at 11.20pm, Cele spoke highly of the conduct of the police.
“I finally went to sleep at 3.40am,” Minister Cele recalled.
With Zuma in jail, he received intelligence that it was not over, as a convoy of trucks had started blockading the N3 where many were later set on fire.
“We then decided to stop the demobilisation of the police that were in Eshowe, many of whom came from other provinces,” Cele told the hearing.
He had invited National Commissioner Khehla Sitole on the mission to Durban, Cele said, “But he did not avail himself.”
Cele would close his opening statement by subtly laying bare the uneasy truce between himself and Sitole, saying he did not remember seeing Sitole anywhere: “where things were happening; where people were dying, where there was looting”.
Sitole had himself been to the hearing – twice. And yet, according to Cele, the national commissioner was MIA during the July violence.
In his testimony – on both occasions, Sitole was found wanting.
Minister Cele could not emphasise it enough that the narrative that police did not do enough was misleading: “It is not correct.”
“Police did the work on that day,” he said on no less than two occasions in his statement.
He was in Phoenix, where again, he did not set eyes on Sitole.
Cele said there were 60 people arrested for the Phoenix killings, “all of them people of Indian descent”.
The suspects are responsible for the 37 murders that took place in the Indian township, Cele said.
Only three of the victims were of Indian origin, he said.
Cele said he ran around 'like a headless chicken' (his words), but where there was a good story to tell, the media was absent, he lamented: “Where there was not a window scratched, the media did not pitch.”
When he went to Bhambayi – one of the black settlements near Phoenix – he was accused of having “gone to eat curry first”.
He started with about 100 people in one meeting. The numbers gradually increased until virtually the whole community showed up. One member of parliament, whom he did not name, ran away from the same meeting, Cele said.
In his view, the police did well. “Marikana still haunts the police.” This was his retort to why the police did not act when criminality was committed in their presence.
“The police from Eshowe did not have rubber bullets, they only had live ammunition,” he said.
Sunday Independent