Time to call it quits for Bheki Cele

BHEKI Cele’s ministry has spent R2.8 billion – being put up in hotels, being entertained and entertaining and being catered for and catering – since he was appointed police minister in 2019.

You can’t help but think what else has happened since 2019: a draconian lockdown against the spread of Covid-19 which did less to curb spread the infection and more to cause the rise of gender-based violence behind closed doors and a booming trade in illicit cigarettes and booze. The police enforced all of that, including chasing people off deserted beaches.

During the July insurrection last year, the police literally stood by as thousands of people plundered shopping malls and distribution centres in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. They did nothing to stop them. Apparently, they didn’t even know it was going to happen. That’s without looking at all the myriad crises that haven’t made the front-page news but have catastrophically affected families by the police’s sometimes unwillingness and general inability.

Throughout all of this, we have had to endure the exponential growth in our police minister’s insensitivity, thin skin and overweening sense of selfworth and entitlement. There is literally barely a week that goes by without Cele becoming the news because he simply cannot help himself from shouting his mouth off with another crass or craven sound bite that, in most cases, is at the expense of the victims themselves.

As we remember the 10th anniversary of the Marikana massacre, the worst human rights incident in post-apartheid history, which was perpetrated by the same South African Police “Service”; as we buckle under the unprecedented spiralling cost of living and as we fight crime on our own – there is only one question.

How long can we afford, literally, to keep on indulging a political leader who is so obviously out of his depth and unfit for the job at hand?