When President Nelson Mandela signed the South African Police Service Act into law in October 1995, South Africa formally replaced oppressive apartheid-era policing structures with the South African Police Service (SAPS) – an institution expected to protect communities, investigate crime fairly, uphold rights under the new Constitution, and defend human dignity rather than subjugate the South African people.
General George Fivaz became the first National Commissioner of this reimagined institution, appointed by a president who understood the cost of giving power to those sworn to protect when that power is used to harm. Their generation did not fight for the police, but fought against them. The act of building something new, something accountable and constitutionally bound, was a declaration of what kind of country South Africa was to become.
I have thought about that moment often in recent months while watching certain events unfold inside the SAPS and asking whether the criminal justice cluster (CJC) we have today bears any resemblance to the one Mandela helped create.
A South Africa in dire need of a stronger CJC
Any discussion of SAPS leadership must begin with the violent crime environment created by a failing justice cluster, because this cannot be treated as an internal management problem while South Africans are being murdered and assaulted at a staggering rate.
Families are carrying the brutal weight of South Africa’s crime crisis. According to the SAPS’ Police Recorded Crime Statistics for January to March 2026, some 5,181 people were murdered in just three months, alongside 6,916 attempted murders, 12,590 sexual offences, and 43,576 assaults with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm. These crimes are tearing through households, robbing mothers, fathers, children, brothers, and sisters of safety, dignity, and peace, while leaving entire communities trapped in fear.
While South Africans are faced with this level of violent crime, the institution responsible for protecting them is also carrying serious internal failures. Between April 2019 and March 2025, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) received 439 complaints of police corruption. From 2022 to 2025, IPID investigations led to 37 SAPS members being convicted of corruption, yet only 17 were dismissed.
In January 2026, it was further revealed that more than R25 million in salaries had been paid over two years to 233 suspended SAPS members facing charges including rape, corruption, and armed robbery. These failures leave the police service fighting a violent crime crisis with its own credibility under siege.
Many of the issues in the CJC must be ascribed to leadership failure, as the structures meant to uphold the law and keep people safe are being dragged down by the same leaders who should be strengthening them and carrying the institution through a crime crisis of this scale.
Change must happen at the very top
Leadership rot in the CJC was exposed at the highest level in April 2026 when sitting National Commissioner General Fannie Masemola was placed on precautionary suspension after charges linked to alleged procurement irregularities were brought by the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (IDAC), before appearing in the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court. The matter reaches far beyond the fate of one officeholder and lays bare a deep institutional failure, exposing a culture in which rank is protected until courts, prosecutors, and external bodies force the consequences that should have come from within SAPS itself.
A strong police service requires a National Commissioner willing to make accountability the norm inside the institution rather than the exception, with civilian oversight structures strong enough to support that work when resistance solidifies around reform. Acting National Commissioner Lieutenant General Puleng Dimpane has already signalled an awareness of the institutional weaknesses she has inherited.
In Parliament in November 2025, Dimpane criticised SAPS’s handling of procurement violations, taking a courageous position from inside the institution rather than from the safety of outside commentary. Her next test will be whether that awareness can be turned into structural change in a system where senior management often closes ranks when reform threatens entrenched interests, and civilian oversight must help ensure that accountability does not die inside the same system that has resisted it.
The Civilian Secretariat for Police Service becomes critical in this environment because it is one of the few structures with the authority to hold the police to account without seizing operational command. Its role sits at the centre of the constitutional architecture that stops policing power from turning inward and protecting itself. A weakened or ignored oversight architecture leaves the police to investigate their own collapse, excuse their own failures, and absorb their own scandals until the damage spills out again in every quarterly crime statistics report.
What South Africa needs from its police leadership is not heroism, but exceptional discipline, consistency, and a serious commitment to placing the right people in the right roles while providing the resources that officers at the coalface need.
The founding promise that Mandela’s government made to South Africans in 1995 was that the police would serve the people. Thirty years on, that promise remains unmet in too many communities – not because the officers on the ground have abandoned it, but because the leadership structure above them has too often failed to uphold it. That is the conversation we must be willing to have, clearly and without flinching, if we are serious about building the safer South Africa that is both constitutionally required and morally overdue.
