Parliament has been requested to call Police Minister Bheki Cele and National Police Commissioner Fannie Masemola to account, for the continued attack on Patricia Mashale’s family.
This after police and violence monitor Mary de Haas accused Cele and members of police management of being behind the attack on Mashale’s family.
The allegations came after a suspicious SAPS crime intelligence vehicle put the family of Mashale under surveillance for the whole weekend of December 2 and 3.
Questions were sent to Cele’s spokesperson Lirandzu Themba, Parliament’s Moloto Mothapo, and police national spokesperson Athlenda Mathe on the matter, but they did not respond.
Mathe said she was waiting on the SAPS in the Free State to provide answers.
De Haas said when the family realised that pictures had been taken, the members of the police force tried to force themselves into the yard and access the home.
She said the officers also made abusive remarks and threats to the children in the house, including a 12-year-old minor and his pregnant sister.
“This gross violation of several Constitutional rights occurs - in so far as the minor child is concerned it also conspicuously breaches the Children’s Act in several respects - and is taking place at an exorbitant cost to taxpayers, targeting innocent people, including a child, while criminals run rampant,” said De Haas.
Mashale is a whistle-blower and a former senior administrative clerk who worked for SAPS in the Free State.
She reported alleged suspicious activities committed by senior SAPS officials. The allegations included how illegal firearms were being sold by police officials to criminal syndicates.
She has been in hiding after she reported the allegations.
She also reported irregular appointments and promotions and the misuse of state resources.
Mashale and her family’s rights have been violated for the past two years, including in November last year when the vehicle driving the family from boarding school was allegedly followed to Bloemfontein by an unmarked car occupied by police members.
De Haas said the recent outrage against the family relates to serious violations of the rights of Mashale’s children by members of the Criminal Investigation Section (CIS).
“All of this is happening during 16 Days of Activism against violence targeting women and children, making a complete mockery of the platitudes and rhetoric spewed out by those in governance. Members of Parliament have taken an oath of office to defend the Constitution, but you are doing nothing whatsoever to stop the Minister of Police, whose role is supposed to be to prevent crime, from violating the Constitution by running the police operationally himself, causing them to commit crimes,” read the letter.
“This is the very same man who was dishonourably discharged as National Commissioner after, among other things, lying under oath at a judicial inquiry, and who has outstanding criminal cases against him.”
De Haas added: “My question to honourable parliamentarians: Are you going to allow this situation, in which the Minister is responsible for criminal actions, including the violations of rights of women and children, and risking the security of South Africa, to continue with the impunity he currently enjoys? Surely you should also be calling the president to account for why he keeps him on as a minister of police?”
De Haas said should parliamentarians continue not to hold Cele accountable, it would raise serious questions about its commitment to the Constitution they took oath to defend. She said this would suggest a complete indifference to the tremendous, ongoing trauma and the suffering of Mashale and her children.
She also pleaded with President Cyril Ramaphosa to protect Mashale’s children: “It is President Ramaphosa who bears the responsibility for the abuses suffered by Mashale’s children - and others - at the hands of the police because he refuses to remove the minister who, in running the police operationally himself, is fuelling a lawlessness led by SAPS management.”
“Our president also turns a blind eye, not only to the plethora of allegations (and cases) of criminality, and his lying under oath at the inquiry which dismissed him as a National Commissioner, against Cele, but he even allows him to run all the police oversight bodies. Ramaphosa has turned us into a de facto police state in which politicians, not our civil servants, run our institutions,” said De Haas.
Sunday Independent