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IOL News
15-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
‘Crime is planned from prison,' says former police minister Bheki Cele
Former Police Minister has disclosed that South Africa's violent crime is planned from within prisons by inmates serving life sentences. Image: X/@SizweMpofu-Walsh Former Police Minister Bheki Cele has made a shocking revelation, claiming that most of South Africa's violent crime is being planned and organised from behind bars by inmates serving life sentences. 'Most of the crime is planned from prison,' Cele said during an interview on the Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh Xperience (SMWX) podcast. 'The people that are doing life sentences, they run crime outside.' Cele, who served as Minister of Police from 2018 to 2024, said correctional facilities have become a place where criminal syndicates are coordinating illicit activities beyond prison walls. 'Correctional facilities themselves are, in some ways, reproducing crime,' he said. 'One day I was phoned by a guy in prison who refused to tell me who he was. He warned me that a chief was going to be killed in Ulundi. He gave me names, the lodge, and everything.' Cele said he passed the information to KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi. 'When Mkhwanazi got there, he found exactly what the caller had described. That came from someone inside prison,' he said. Cele also said the Wellington Prison, Mthatha in the Eastern Cape is known as a planning centre for conflicts in the taxi industry. 'That's a big problem. The case of Thabo Bester was high-profile, but there are many like him. Not just escapees, people who are still inside, sending out plans,' he said. He added that addressing crime in South Africa requires more than just empowering the police. 'You can't just strengthen the police. You need to strengthen the entire criminal justice system,' Cele said. Cele, who served as National Commissioner of Police from 2009 to 2011 before being removed in 2012 over misconduct allegations, said crime statistics during his leadership were significantly lower. 'Go study the crime stats from 2009 to 2012. They came down. Not just by numbers, South Africans said they could sleep with their doors open,' he said. He credited the drop in crime to strategic collaboration during preparations for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Cele said they created the Tactical Response Team, known as the 'AmaBherethe,' after a cash heist in Pretoria where two men and women in blue were killed. 'Police at the scene couldn't pursue suspects driving high-performance vehicles in their standard-issue Corollas,' Cele said. He said the TRT served as a buffer between regular police stations and elite units like the National Intervention Unit and the Special Task Force. 'We bought GTIs and BMWs for the unit. We strengthened the force. At the time, we had about 195,000 police officers for a population of 50 million,' Cele said. But after leaving office in 2012, Cele said many of these initiatives were dismantled. 'When I returned in 2018, South Africa had grown to 60 million people, but the police officers had declined to 184,000…We had lost 15,000 officers,' he said. He said after that, he then approached President Cyril Ramaphosa to fund the training of new officers in three cycles of 10,000 every year, which restored the police numbers to 2010 levels. Cele lamented the declining morale in the police force, adding that in a month during his tenure, about 312 officers resigned. 'I called some of them to ask why. One warrant officer told me, 'When my daughter was born, I was a warrant officer. She's a graduate now, and I'm still a warrant officer,'' Cele said. Cele said meaningful crime reduction will require more community engagement. 'I don't care how many police you put on the street, if communities aren't part of safety and security, we won't win,' he said. 'These criminals are sons and husbands of people who live in those communities.' He expressed concern over South Africa's rates of gender-based violence (GBV). 'In just three months, 10,000 women are raped. Half of them are raped in their own homes, by their brothers, stepfathers, or other family members,' Cele said. 'Where are the police when a sibling rapes a sibling?' Cele also blamed undocumented immigrants as a serious concern. 'The worst part is, when they commit crime, they are untraceable and can easily disappear. That poses a major challenge,' he said. He said the entire security cluster needs to be strengthened to address the scale and complexity of South Africa's crime crisis. 'There's still a lot of work to do,' he said. IOL News
Daily Maverick
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Feral Errol — there is no filter to the antiquated brain of Musk's dad, a 20th-century relic
Errol Musk, whose busy loins begat Elon (and a child by Elon's stepsister), gives the kind of sexist, racist quotes that make digital media salivate. Not a week goes by without Errol (who was born in 1946, the same year as US President Donald Trump) leaping at interview offers to offload his opinions, thoughts, advice to governments, women, his son and the world at large. Like a prophet from a dying age. Circling above like a bird of prey is the algorithm. And Errol Musk is an algorithmic wet dream. Feral Errol generates quotes that predate civilisation as we know it almost as regularly as Trump and his overlord son, Elon, the richest man in the world, who has Petri-dished 13 'acknowledged' children. The unholy trinity of the internet They are the apex predators of the pyramid that trickles down to the Joe Rogans, Andrew Tates and other testosterone-fuelled Maga influencers on Musk's X, and inserting themselves everywhere else. Make no mistake, there are many women in this squad. First among equals is Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, who wears bling like war medals to go with her machine gun while shaven-headed Venezuelan deportees cower in a prison cell in El Salvador. Viral in 60 seconds. From revealing that he once thought Elon was 'retarded' and the notion that a woman who has had many sexual partners is 'dirty' to suggesting that Afrikaners are 'stupid', there is no filter to Errol's brain. Much like Trump's free-styling free speech. Political analyst Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh pulled off a coup with his hosting of Big Daddy Musk on his YouTube channel SMWX on 13 April. Like the others in the trinity, Errol loves and craves attention and acknowledgement. This takes up so much time that self-reflection would be impossible and besides, it is only for sissies. And so Mpofu-Walsh let the old man ramble on, not interrupting while he set out his life of extreme privilege and political connection and the lives his children enjoyed scooting around on jets. Until the little empire all came crashing down. They lived, he informed Mpofu-Walsh, in a grand house in Pretoria, now occupied by the EU ambassador. 'Did you know that?' he asks a sanguine Mpofu-Walsh. Elon grew up in a mansion decorated with leftover flowers brought personally to their home by Elize Botha, wife of then prime minister PW Botha, the iron man of apartheid known as the Big Crocodile. Perhaps the sweet smell of the blossoms masked what was going on outside the walls of the mansion, where the revolution simmered and periodically delivered bombs in Wimpy Bars and detainees falling out of windows at John Vorster Square, home to the police's Security Branch. Then, when things got hot in 1989, they all scrambled for an exit, with Errol claiming that some of the best minds left the country then. Poor South Africa, left behind all alone, bereft and deprived of such talent. What a catastrophe. The PayPal mafia Exports Papa Musk might be referring to are Peter Thiel, David Sacks and Roelof Botha, now known as the 'PayPal mafia'. Do listen and watch Errol offloading on SMWX. It will take about an hour of your time, but will place in context the contours of his mind and the narrow pathways that shape this thinking. What becomes clear is that this is a class of individual who moves through the world transactionally. Perhaps it is because the Musks have uprooted themselves so often to chase some Aryan dream that they are culturally marooned and money is where the roots are. Community in transaction. Like the immigrant Trumps, who uprooted themselves from Scotland and Germany to settle in the US. God bless South Africa The sense of community and belonging the rest of us might feel, or the commitment to making South Africa better for all of us, has no Velcro in their neck of the woods. There is no Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu abantu (there should be no need to translate any more, but here it is: a person is a person through other people) because they have hearts that belong to money, cash, moola. Although Elon Musk might ride the PR that what he does is good for humanity, our eyes and hearts tell us otherwise. Travel across this country and see for yourself the compassion and humanity among the wreckage of the past still strewn in our path. It is remarkable. So too is the cruelty. Those who did not flee but saw a future for South Africa, no matter how blurry, and remain today celebrate our freedom, thank you very much. Read the preamble to our Constitution. Step back a second and look at the government of national unity Cabinet (yes, yes, they are bickering, but what did we expect?), and you will see who we are. DM This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
