New commander ready to serve
He is happy to be in White River and has great plans to improve the station's policing services.
Some might have seen him chasing after outlaws already, and had better believe that the community will be seeing more of him.
Lt Col Mapitso Makgatho is the new White River Police Station commander, and it seems like he has not come for fun and games. Within two months in his new position, he rearranged his police members and created new crime prevention teams to run sectors under White River, effective from June.
“When I got here in March, I saw there was no unity. There is still separation of brown and white individuals. I want to include every member in everything,”
he said.
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Makgatho is originally from Bochum in Limpopo and was happy to share that he is a churchgoer, a family man, a husband and a father to three sons.
He began his career as a constable in 2005. With mentoring on the side from his superiors, he worked his way to being the leader he is today.
“I was stationed in Johannesburg when I began 17 years ago. Then I became the acting commander of the management information system stationed at Heidelberg in 2008, and was recognised as the number-one manager of the system in the country in 2009.”
“I came to Mpumalanga in 2014, when I was stationed at Pienaar Police Station as the cluster manager for the information system. I wanted to get back to the field because my work was office-bound. I became the Vispol commander in KaNyamazane in 2016. I was also the commander of the operations command centre district team with its 15 members. We recovered a lot of firearms and drugs, and ran a lot of crime prevention operations,” Makgatho reminisced.
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He was the commander for the provincial task team in 2017 when he worked at most of Mpumalanga’s police stations. He made his current rank of lieutenant colonel when he became the Vispol commander at the Pienaar Police Station in 2019.
“We will embark on more awareness campaigns to inform parents to ensure their children’s safety and to report matters immediately. We will have community policing forum training for communities, because we want the community to be involved in crime preventions,” Makgatho said.
