South Africa: Police minister says intelligence failure after over 200 die

AMID the devastating unrest in South Africa over the past few weeks, the country’s police minister Bheki Cele has said that he did not receive any intelligence report from the State Security Agency (SSA), which looks after the civilian intelligence operations, about the turmoil in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and Gauteng provinces that were badly hit.

Speaking at a joint standing committee on defence and portfolio committee on police outreach visit to Chatsworth in Durban in KZN, Cele said he did not receive any intelligence report which Ayanda Dlodlo, the state security minister, spoke about, South Africa’s online news portal News24 said. Last week, Dlodlo said they had handed over the information they received to the police department.

“It is you, the minister, who would have given the product to me. The minister of SSA could not give the product direct to the other DG. It would have come to me, and I would have given it to the national commissioner. I want to repeat here that I have never seen that product,” he said.

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When Cele was asked why the police did not act on the intelligence inputs, he told the parliamentarians that he did not sign for any report on intelligence from the SSA.

The police minister said the Crime Intelligence Division does not deal with crimes against the state but issues like cash-in-transit heists and house break-ins, suggesting that it was a failure on behalf of the SSA and not Crime Intelligence which reports to him.

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Reacting to Cele’s claims, Dlodlo expressed shock on Tuesday. “Intelligence reports are given to structures who are our clients are on rare occasions to Ministers. Why he chooses to distort facts by insinuating that I had said I gave him a report or reports baffles me,” she told News24 on Tuesday.

The unrest has claimed more than 200 lives and South Africa’s economy has taken a serious hit.

Acting minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said in KZN, 150,000 jobs were at risk because of the wanton destruction and the province’s GDP could face a loss of 20 billion South African Rands ($1.3 billion) because of the unrest.

The disturbance started after former South African president Jacob Zuma was recently sent to jail on charges of contempt of court after he failed to cooperate with a state commission investigating corruption charges during his tenure between 2009 and 2018.