The dismissal of the Western Cape’s head of detectives, Jeremy Vearey, has once again emphasised the rot that exists within the SAPS.
Vearey, a former uMkhonto weSizwe guerrilla who was imprisoned on Robben Island, became one of Nelson Mandela’s bodyguards and was integrated into the National Intelligence Agency, the predecessor to the State Security Agency, in 1994.
In 1996 he joined the SAPS where he was forced to work alongside some of the police officers who had hounded him in the 1980s. His axing last week was allegedly over his Facebook posts, which the police’s senior management deemed to have been targeted at under-fire National Police Commissioner Khehla Sitole.
This had not been Vearey's first clash with national police management. In 2016 he and former SAPS national Crime Intelligence boss Peter Jacobs were unceremoniously removed as deputy provincial commissioners for the Western Cape and demoted to cluster commanders. They took their case to the Labour Court and won reinstatement, but this would not be the end of their troubles.
Jacobs, who was moved from his position as the head of National Crime Intelligence, recently won an interdict against national police management, blocking them from starting a disciplinary hearing over the assassination of former Anti-Gang Unit commander Charl Kinnear in September last year.
Police management alleged that Jacobs failed to act on warnings that Kinnear’s phone had been tracked by underworld figures. Sitole is also under the microscope as President Cyril Ramaphosa mulls whether to launch an inquiry into his fitness to hold office after a complaint by Police Minister Bheki Cele.
Some would suggest that Vearey is a victim of a factional power struggle within the SAPS between Cele and Sitole. But while senior police management have been at loggerheads, South Africans have been suffering. Two weeks ago 13 people were killed in cold blood on the streets of Khayelitsha. The daily murder rate stands at 58, and while there are many variables, this can never be tenable and we demand that police take seriously the fight against crime instead of the preoccupation with factional battles.
The Star