‘Special Closure’: The high-water mark of IPID’s cover-up

The Independent Police Investigative Directorate’s (IPID) intake registers are replete with complaints of heinous crimes by police officers across South Africa. One originates from a small, rural township in northern KwaZulu-Natal on the evening of 29 June 2014.

It recounts how Zikhona Hadebe*, a woman in her late twenties, got into a fight with her partner. The fight was apparently severe enough for her to call 10111, the police emergency hotline, for help. The operator told her to sit tight; officers were on the way to assist.

A police van soon arrived. There were four officers inside. Hadebe got into the vehicle and the officers said they would take her to the police station. Instead, they drove to the nearby town of Empangeni. One of the officers “injected” Hadebe with something. She was “told to sniff drugs”.

According to the description, Hadebe then “passed out and was repeatedly raped”.

Hadebe’s complaint was first registered as a rape case at her local police station. But, because the suspects were police officials, the docket was referred to IPID’s KwaZulu-Natal office.

Exactly 392 days later, case worker Smanga Nkwanyana closed Hadebe’s file as “indeterminate” which, in official terms, meant that he was “unable to prove the allegation”.

In October, Viewfinder exposed that IPID investigators and their managers had taken short cuts on investigations in a bid to inflate performance statistics. Whistle-blower reports suggested the practice was systemic, widespread across South Africa, and had evolved over many years.

Days after Viewfinder published, IPID acting executive director Victor Senna committed to publish the directorate’s own report on statistical manipulation. That report’s scope is expected to be narrow. It will only look at a limited number of cases that were apparently closed prematurely between mid-2015 and mid-2016. The scope, as Viewfinder understands, would, however, include an analysis of the Hadebe rape case file.

In IPID’s data, certain hallmarks in the closure of the Hadebe case suggest that the closure was, probably, an instance of statistical manipulation. For one thing, Nkwanyana (the IPID investigator) approved the closure of a case in which he was also the “case worker”. Doing so was prohibited by IPID’s quality assurance safeguards.

Yet, it is the “special closure” status, which Nkwanyana assigned to the Hadebe case, that presents the biggest red flag. Since KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng whistle-blowers flagged it with head office in 2016, the term “special closure” has become associated with statistical rigging at IPID.

When former IPID director Robert McBride testified at the Zondo Commission of Inquiry in April, he said: “The provision of special closure in the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) was abused to prematurely close cases or bring them to finality so that it can appear that IPID has gone through all these cases at rapid speed.”

McBride was reflecting upon happenings at the IPID during his 18-month suspension.

“Special closures” often meant IPID officials used their discretionary powers – for instance that a case was “unsubstantiated” or “indeterminate” – in order to close and archive cases, instead of investigating them properly and referring the completed dockets for prosecution.

IPID data shows that 1,586 cases were dispensed of as “special closures” between June 2015 and September 2016. Like the Hadebe rape case, the overwhelming majority of these were from KwaZulu-Natal.

IPID’s 2015/16 Master registers show that hundreds of cases were disposed of as ‘special closures’. McBride reported at the Zondo Commission that this was done to manipulate statistics. (Photo: Daneel Knoetze)