Allegations that police recruits have illegally gained their places at police training colleges are contained in a voice note from a shop steward of the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) leaked to Daily Maverick. It is speculated that most of these recruits were from Limpopo and Gauteng.
Earlier this year, President Cyril Ramaphosa reiterated that rigorous standards were needed when recruiting and training new SAPS members, and the rush to hire suggests lessons from recent history have not been learnt.
The country’s need to up its safety and security game was also highlighted by the July 2021 insurrection. The country’s security agencies were caught unaware, and their capacity was allegedly also undermined from within.
To address the lack of capacity, Deputy Minister of Police Cassel Mathale indicated SAPS’ plans to go on a massive recruitment drive in 2022 as part of the move to bolster the organisation.
Voice note
The voice note from the Popcru shop steward said: “I think this one needs real intervention. On Tuesday (1 November) ... at the Oudtshoorn Police Training College we were informed that there was a SAPS Human Resource Development task team taking down statements of all the students.
“Apparently some of the students did not come through the correct processing, testing fitness and interviews etc … They or their parents bought their way in … it seems as if it is almost half of the college.”
The person continued: “There is an intense investigation that is going to last until Friday. It appears … most of them are going to be dismissed … We have tasked the leadership of the police college to give us all the names.”
On Wednesday, Daily Maverick approached Popcru’s national spokesperson Richard Mamabolo for comment. He said: “The matter you raised is still sub-judice and there is no confirmation yet because it is an allegation which has not been confirmed by anybody.
“We as the organisation can only be informed when the affected parties are officially charged.”
SAPS national spokesperson Colonel Athlenda Mathe told Daily Maverick that the inquiry has been referred to the service’s human resources department.
Read more in Daily Maverick: “In 2019 the human resources and training components told Parliament they wanted to focus on ‘quality’ rather than ‘quantity’ and minimise the risk of corruption in hiring processes”
The stringent tests new recruits were set to undergo are set out in a SAPS media statement dated 1 February 2022. This statement says all applicants will be subjected to fitness, psychometric and integrity testing, as well as medical evaluation, and they will be interviewed during the recruitment, selection and enlistment process. SAPS will also verify qualifications, drivers’ licence, citizenship and the residential address of each applicant.
Mathe said at the time that the recruitment process had reached an advanced stage with recruits having completed various stages in the recruitment and selection process and that they were awaiting the final stage of a medical assessment.
This is not the first allegation of recruits purportedly buying their way into the service. In May this year, allegations of police recruits paying to be admitted to the police training college in Pretoria came to light and reached the ears of the independent Policing Union of South Africa (Ipusa).
‘Flawed process’
Ipusa’s president Bethuel Nkuna said that the recruitment of new police officers was a flawed process that opened loopholes for irregularities.
“When you address the shortage of members it cannot be done en masse, meaning you don’t have to recruit in ten thousands, because when you recruit in an influx there is a good chance whereby good candidates can miss out.
“The recruitment and selection processes are then compromised because you want to close this space in a very short time. That is where the elements of crime — where people even pay for their jobs — comes in,” he explained.
Ipusa suggested that SAPS should rather recruit incrementally so all processes were done properly — recruits had to be “vetted properly before entering policing”.
Nkuna further highlighted that a person who had paid to get the job was already a criminal:
“We already have a number of police in this corrupt environment who are doing some elements of crime. Now… a new person (who) has entered in a criminal way. That person is going to do what the others are doing.” DM