#TwoBits: South Africa’s police service has more bosses than boots

If you spend any time watching the two official inquiries into the very sad state of South African policing, you will surely ask yourself if there are any real policemen out there.

I mean, everybody is a general. Lieutenant-general, major-general, brigadier-general . . . all big shots with big salaries, but I wouldn’t trust many of them to lick a postage stamp.

Apart from Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, that is. He’s the one who set the cat amongst the pigeons last July. He’s from Edendale in ‘Maritzburg, my childhood home town, so he must be okay.

I turned to Grok, my favourite AI tool, to investigate how the SA Police Service compares with other police forces. I chose two of this country’s BRICS partners, India and Brazil. China and Russia are excluded because the first doesn’t publish data and the second is just too huge an economy to use for comparison.

South Africa has 800-900 officers of general rank in a force of about 190 000. General staff are the top people in any police organisation. The worldwide ‘norm’ for the ratio of generals to other ranks is
1:1 000. In the Saps it is 1:200.

Now here’s the news – India’s force is 11 times larger but has 5 000 general staff for a force of 2.2 million officers. Brazil’s is four times larger and has about 200 general staff in a federal force of 800 000 officers. That works out at 1:4 000.

It gets worse. Or better, depending on your perspective. Saps generals are the highest paid (converted to Rands for easy comparison), earning the highest (~R103k-R124k monthly basic), far above peers relative to force size/economy. India’s top ranks get ~R26k-R40k plus perks, and Brazil is strong at ~R46k-R92k, varying by state.

By the way, stats for Nigeria, Africa’s largest police force, are not reliable but are thought to be very low at ~R3k-R8k for seniors.

So the Saps is top heavy, but you’ve already guessed that. The Saps is always pleading poverty, but that’s not surprising since after paying the generals there’s little left over for the policemen on the ground.

The whole police force needs a serious shakeup, irrespective of nitpicking over who’s telling the bigger lies to the Madlanga commission or parliamentary committee. From the evidence we’ve heard, Mkhwanazi wasn’t making it up when he said the Saps was rotten.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the force is top heavy. It’s the national way. SA also has probably the largest cabinet in the world for population size, at 34 ministers and 43 deputies for 63.6 million people.

Brazil has a similar number for 213 million while India has 30 members of its core cabinet in a population of 1.47 billion. The US, UK and the majority of countries across the world average in the 20s.\

Argentina’s President Javier Milei leads the pack for frugality. When he took office he wielded a chainsaw on government, slashing departments from 19 to 9, with a cabinet today of only eight ministers.

I sincerely hope that after all the fuss of these commissions of inquiry, that there will be decisive action for improvement. We want leaders who take decisions for the good of the country.

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Watching social media is mostly like panning for gold: you have to sift mountains of dirt before you get a little gold.

A post on social media platform X over the weekend was making fun of the new movie Melania – about the American first lady – and Donald Trump’s grandiose remark that the film was ‘one of the most important events of our time’.

I loved the deadpan comment by one person: ‘Abraham Lincoln reportedly said after watching the film Melania, that it was the worst experience he’s ever had in a movie theatre’.

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