Johannesburg - In March 1994, a Bophuthatswana police sergeant shot and killed three Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) members on a dusty road in Mafikeng lying next to an old blue Mercedes Benz. Ontlametse Bernstein Menyatsoe’s act was captured forever because he did it right in front of a posse of media.
It was a seminal moment in South Africa’s transition from apartheid, shifting the trajectory by showing unequivocally that whites could no longer hope to rule by the barrel of the gun – not if they wanted to live.
On July 2, eight members of Deputy President Paul Mashatile’s SAPS protection detail pulled over a VW Polo on the M1. They got out and started kicking the four occupants, grievously assaulting them and smashing in the car’s window with the butt of one of their assault rifles.
It was an appalling act of vicious bullying because – much like the AWB’s invasion of Bop to “help” the Bantustan’s president Lucas Mangope – the cops obviously believed they could. And they almost got away with it – if it hadn’t been for a motorist behind them capturing the whole incident on video.
There has been massive pressure to make the entire incident go away; muzzling the victims, who are trainee soldiers, intimidating the witness over and above the SAPS dragging its feet to investigate the case. Ultimately though, the outcry was just too great.
This week, those eight officers have been held in custody, trying increasingly desperately to get bail. But it wasn’t the video of them beating and kicking their victims, while armed to the teeth, that was the seminal moment. No, that came in this week when they had to stand in the dock like the common criminals they are. It showed the power of the people of this country. It showed the truth of the Rule of Law, that we are all equal in its eye.
It’s amazing how fast the house of cards crumbles when the system works. All of a sudden, Mashatile’s claims not to have been there when the attack took place and seen to be downright lies, because that’s the cops’ actual defence is premised on the fact that they had to protect him.
In fact, the new defence is that he thought they’d stopped in the middle of the motorway to take a piss. Furthermore, we wouldn’t have been able to hear the screaming above the running air con and the car engine.
All of a sudden, treated as common accused, these once untouchable police officers are now pleading for their freedom like ordinary people: so that they can defend themselves in their departmental disciplinary hearings.
Being suspended means they can’t earn overtime. Like the quintessential bullies they are, unmasked of whatever power and privilege they might have thought they had by virtue of their job and their principle, they’ve unmasked themselves as cowards.
It’s a small, but telling, blow against the Big Man politics that have blighted Africa for decades, taking root in this country.
No one takes the piss. It’s something they are finding out at their peril.