1. TO BE OR NOT TO BE
The Madlanga Commission represents a critical venue through which the South African government is subjected to necessary public and institutional scrutiny. At its core, the Commission revives a foundational and enduring question of the democratic era: to be or not to be. In this context, the question concerns whether the state’s security institutions substantively embody the constitutional and democratic commitments of 1994, or whether they continue to reproduce the dysfunctions of their historical antecedents.
One question that has been posed with increasing directness in recent discourse is whether the South African Police Service was ever comprehensively deconstructed and reconstituted following its apartheid-era formation as a racist, militaristic, and anti-mass institution. This is not merely a historical inquiry. It is an assessment of the depth of institutional change and the extent to which the culture, doctrine, and practice of policing were realigned with a democratic legal order.
The answer cannot be reduced to a binary of affirmation or negation. The period after 1994 did not produce an institutional vacuum. Instead, it initiated a deliberate project of transformation. This project was ambitious in scope. It sought to replace a policing model premised on state control and political repression with one grounded in constitutionalism, human rights, accountability, and public service.
However, the outcomes of that project have been uneven and partial. While the legal and policy architecture was fundamentally revised through the Constitution, the SAPS Act, and subsequent reforms, the translation of these mandates into organisational culture has remained incomplete. This is because institutions are not only defined by law and structure, but also by inherited practices, beliefs, and operational logics.
The SAPS today must therefore be understood not as a static entity, but as a site of contestation. Within this institution, two competing paradigms persist in tension.
• The first is the legal-democratic mandate, which requires policing that is lawful, transparent, service-oriented, and accountable to the public.
• The second is the inherited organisational culture, which bears the imprint of a militarised, hierarchical, and securitised approach to social order.
Where the democratic mandate demands engagement, oversight, and restraint, the inherited culture often privileges command, secrecy, and the use of force. Where the Constitution positions communities as rights-bearing citizens to be served, institutional memory continues to frame them at times as populations to be managed or controlled.
It is within this unresolved space that the work of the Madlanga Commission becomes significant. By interrogating contemporary failures of leadership, accountability, and integrity within the SAPS, the Commission forces a broader reckoning with the question of institutional identity. It requires an examination of whether transformation was limited to formal restructuring, or whether it extended to the deeper re-socialiation of the institution.
In this sense, the challenge facing the SAPS is not only operational but ontological. The central task remains the completion of a transformation that is both legal and cultural: the movement from an institution historically designed to police against the people, to one constitutionally mandated to police with and for the people.
2. THE MANDATE OF RUPTURE (1994 – 1998)
The democratic transition of 1994 demanded more than administrative reform. It required a deliberate rupture with the institutional logic of the past.
The apartheid-era South African Police was not conceived as a civilian service oriented toward public safety. It functioned as a paramilitary apparatus, politically aligned to serve and protect the interests of a racial minority, and operationally tasked with the suppression of dissent. Within this architecture, formations such as the Security Branch and Riot Control Units were not peripheral. They were central instruments through which the state maintained control. Their function was to manage what was termed the “security situation,” a mandate that effectively entailed the policing of political opposition and the containment of the majority population.
The post-1994 project therefore set out to dismantle this inherited model and to re-found policing on an entirely different basis. The South African Police Service Act of 1995 embodied this intent both symbolically and substantively. The institution was renamed from a “Force” to a “Service,” a linguistic shift intended to signal a reorientation from coercion to public duty. The highly centralised command structure was replaced with a framework of provincial, area, and station-level decentralisation, meant to bring decision-making closer to communities. In an explicit act of demilitarisation, military ranks, insignia, and uniforms were abolished in order to sever the visual and hierarchical association with an army.
This legal and symbolic restructuring was accompanied by a process of structural integration. The previously fragmented policing landscape was consolidated through the amalgamation of the TBVC homeland police agencies with the national service. Simultaneously, the incorporation of cadres from the African National Congress’s uMkhonto we Sizwe and the Pan Africanist Congress’s Azanian People’s Liberation Army into a single, unified service was intended to broaden the representative and political character of the institution.
The architecture of accountability was also revised. Civilian oversight was institutionalised through the establishment of the Civilian Secretariat for Police Service, designed to function as a mechanism of executive and legislative control. In parallel, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided a public forum for debriefing the past. Through testimony and the amnesty process, it sought, albeit imperfectly, to surface the human rights violations committed under the previous policing regime and to mark a public break with that history.
On paper, these interventions constituted a comprehensive attempt to reconstitute policing. The objective was to ground the SAPS in constitutionalism, human rights, and the principle of service delivery to all communities within a democratic order.
There was sustained pressure from formations such as the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) which must be understood not as a peripheral footnote to police transformation, but as one of the central mechanisms through which the post-1994 project attempted to assert civilian and worker agency within a historically closed, authoritarian institution.
To explore this fully, three dimensions must be interrogated – what the pressure consisted of, why it mattered institutionally, and what its limits reveal about the unfinished debriefing.
The substance of the pressure
POPCRU did not emerge as a traditional labor union only. In the context of the SAP, police and prison personnel were denied the right to organize, to bargain, and to publicly dissent. The apartheid policing model depended on unquestioning obedience, hierarchy, and the suppression of internal critique.
After 1994, POPCRU therefore performed three functions simultaneously:
• Labour representation – negotiating wages, conditions of service, and occupational health for members who had been treated as instruments of the state rather than as workers with rights.
• Democratisation from within – demanding due process, an end to arbitrary command, and protection against victimisation for members who raised concerns about unlawful orders.
• Policy advocacy – intervening in legislative debates on the SAPS Act, oversight, training, and disciplinary procedures to push for a service that would not reproduce apartheid-era abuses against either the public or its own members.
This was “sustained” precisely because it was not a single event. It played out through collective bargaining, litigation, parliamentary submissions, public statements, and internal mobilisation over decades.
Why this pressure mattered to transformation
An institution cannot shift from “force” to “service” if its own members remain locked in a culture of fear, command, and silence. Militarised organizations reproduce themselves by demanding loyalty to hierarchy over loyalty to law.
POPCRU’s presence forced an internal contradiction into the open – could the SAPS claim to serve a constitutional democracy while continuing to treat its members in a manner inconsistent with constitutional labour rights? By insisting on accountability upward as well as outward, the union helped create political space for civilian oversight and for challenging abuses of power within the ranks.
In this sense, the union acted as a debriefing instrument. It demanded that the institution interrogate not only how it policed the public, but how it treated the people inside the uniform.
The limits and the uncompromising truth
To be educating and uncompromising, we must also state what did not happen.
Internal pressure alone could not exorcise a culture that was being reinforced from the top through political appointments, re-militarisation, and operational doctrine after 2000. When leadership reintroduced military ranks and prioritised tactical response over community service, it sent a signal that overrode the union’s advocacy for a civilian ethos.
Furthermore, like many institutions in a young democracy, the relationship between unions, the ruling party, and the state became complex. At times this enabled influence. At other times it constrained the union’s ability to act as an independent check.
Popcru Has Played Its Role Insufficiently
Therefore, “sustained pressure from formations such as POPCRU” represents a critical but incomplete element of transformation. It demonstrates that institutional change cannot be imposed by law alone. It requires organised actors inside the institution to continuously demand that practice conform to principle.
The fact that the hierarchical, force-first culture reasserted itself despite this pressure is not evidence that the pressure was irrelevant. It is evidence that culture is contested terrain, and that without constant reinforcement from leadership, training, oversight, and civil society, even the most sustained internal pressure can be rolled back.
The lesson is blunt – debriefing an institution means institutionalising permanent contestation. If that contestation stops, the old ethos returns.
3. THE PERSISTENCE OF CULTURE AND THE REMILITARIZATION TURN
Yet law and policy do not automatically translate into institutional culture.
Multiple independent assessments of the early SAPS characterised it as an “uncomfortable merger.” Despite the new legal mandate, the institution retained much of the rigid, hierarchical, patriarchal, and militarised culture that had defined the apartheid-era SAP. Formal restructuring had occurred, but the underlying habits of command, deference, and coercion persisted within daily practice.
The most visible indicators of institutional regression became apparent after 2000. From the mid-2000s onward, the SAPS began to display a discernible reorientation toward a militaristic model of policing. This trajectory reached its most explicit expression in 2010 with the reintroduction of military ranks — a decision that carried consequences both practical and symbolic.
Does the return of military ranks signify a deficit in transformation and a persistent attachment to the past? In symbolic terms, the answer must be uncompromisingly affirmative.
The abolition of military ranks in 1995 was never intended as a cosmetic adjustment. It was a deliberate act of institutional signaling. Its purpose was to mark a clear departure from a command-and-control, order-maintenance doctrine, and to inaugurate instead a civilian, service-oriented, and community-accountable ethos. The rank structure is not neutral. It encodes authority, deference, and the way an organization understands its relationship to the public. To remove military titles was to reject the logic that policing is war by other means.
The reintroduction of those ranks therefore signified far more than a change in epaulettes. It represented a doctrinal reversion. It indicated that, when confronted with pressure — political, operational, and related to rising crime — the institution retreated to the familiarity of inherited hierarchies rather than doing the more difficult work of building new models of civilian leadership, accountability, and problem-solving.
When an organisation restores the titles of the very force it had formally repudiated, it raises a question that cannot be avoided – was the ideological debriefing ever substantively completed? Or was the previous organisational culture merely suspended, dormant, and waiting for political and operational conditions conducive to its return?
In this light, 2010 was not simply an administrative reversal. It was evidence that culture had not been replaced, only overlaid. And where culture remains unchanged, structure will eventually be bent to serve it, not the other way around.
Running parallel to this institutional shift was a change in political leadership and orientation. The appointment of Jackie Selebi as National Commissioner is widely cited in scholarly analysis as a turning point. It marked, in this view, the effective end of the early post-1994 emphasis on civilian control and the beginning of a period of increased party-political influence over the direction and management of policing.
4. FRAGMENTATION OF AUTHORITY – THE MUNICIPAL POLICE COMPILATION
This picture is further complicated by the proliferation of policing agencies operating alongside the SAPS.
The Constitution provides for municipal police services, and in practice several major cities, including Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, now maintain their own armed and uniformed services with defined public order and by-law enforcement functions.
Does the presence of municipal police not introduce additional complexity into the security architecture? It does, and in three distinct ways.
• First, it fragments accountability. The operational space is now occupied by the SAPS, Metropolitan Police Services, Traffic Departments, and a vast private security industry, all exercising authority within overlapping jurisdictions. Each operates under a different legislative mandate, chain of command, and training doctrine. This arrangement dilutes the vision of a “single police service” articulated in 1995, and it creates ambiguity for the public regarding who is responsible for what, and to whom.
• Second, it risks replicating the very institutional problem that transformation sought to resolve. Many municipal police units were established by directly modelling themselves on SAPS structures. This includes the adoption of similar rank systems, command hierarchies, and specialized tactical units. Rather than generating a new civilian policing paradigm, the effect has been to multiply the existing one. In several municipalities, Metro Police have themselves been criticized for employing militaristic approaches to crowd management and public order, suggesting the reproduction of inherited practices rather than their transcendence.
• Third, it entrenches a tiered system of policing. Affluent metropolitan governments possess the fiscal capacity to fund better-resourced, better-equipped municipal services. Rural areas and poorer municipalities, by contrast, remain almost entirely dependent on the SAPS, an institution that is both overstretched and still contending with the legacy of its own history. This disparity produces unequal access to policing that is responsive, visible, and oriented toward service.
Municipal policing was conceived as a mechanism to bring law enforcement closer to communities and to improve local responsiveness. In practice, it has added another layer to an already complex security architecture, one that itself remains incompletely transformed.
5 AN EXPLORATORY CONCLUSION – TRANSFORMATION WITHOUT CLOSURE
So, was the SAPS “never debriefed”? Empirically, that proposition is incorrect. Let us start by exploring if we are not letting our dreams dictate what South African policing could look like.
Examples From Elsewhere
There is no institutional excuse for claiming that demilitarising the SAPS is impossible. The historical record demonstrates otherwise. Demilitarisation has been undertaken elsewhere, under different political and security conditions, and with varying degrees of success. Italy did it. Ireland did it. Japan did it. East Germany did it.
The point of examining these cases is not to suggest simple transplantation. It is to establish, without ambiguity, that a police institution can be moved from a military or paramilitary footing to a civilian footing by deliberate state action. The question is therefore not one of feasibility. It is one of political will and sustained implementation.
Italy: 1981 – Structural separation from the armed forces
The Polizia di Stato was formally demilitarised in 1981. Prior to that it operated within a military framework. The reform removed military status, military ranks, and military discipline from the corps and redefined it as a civilian police service under the Ministry of the Interior.
This did not erase all military characteristics. Italy retained two explicitly military police forces — the Carabinieri and the Guardia di Finanza — as part of the Armed Forces. The demilitarisation of the Polizia di Stato therefore represented a choice – to create at least one national civilian policing pillar distinct from the military. The lesson is that demilitarisation can be partial and still meaningful, provided the civilian service is given clear mandate, resources, and doctrine.
Ireland: 1922 – Foundational rejection of a colonial paramilitary model
The establishment of An Garda Síochána was an act of institutional rupture. It replaced the Royal Irish Constabulary, a force associated with colonial control and counter-insurgency.
The new service was constituted as unarmed, civil, and non-military. It was given no formal military role and was placed under civilian authority from inception. This was not a reform of an existing force. It was the creation of a new institution designed to embody a different relationship between state and citizen. The Irish example shows that demilitarisation is most complete when it occurs at a moment of founding, and when it is tied to a new constitutional order.
Japan: 1954 – Post-conflict reconstruction under external and internal pressure
After World War II, Japan’s pre-war militarised policing system was dismantled during the Allied occupation. In 1954 the Police Law created the National Police Agency and prefectural police forces as civilian bodies. Central command, military equipment, and wartime doctrine were removed.
The reform was imposed in a context of defeat and occupation, but it was sustained because it was embedded in a new constitution and a broader project of democratic state-building. The Japanese case illustrates that demilitarisation is possible even in a society with a strong prior tradition of state coercion, if it is tied to legal and constitutional guarantees.
East Germany: 1990 – Dissolution through reunification
The Volkspolizei-Bereitschaften, East Germany’s riot and paramilitary police, were disbanded during reunification. Their functions were absorbed into civilian police structures of the Federal Republic. The paramilitary formations were not reformed, they were terminated.
This demonstrates the most radical form of demilitarisation -the recognition that certain institutional forms cannot be salvaged and must be replaced entirely for a democratic policing order to take root.
What these examples establish for South Africa
Taken together, these cases refute the claim of impossibility. They show four different pathways:
• Reform within continuity,
• Founding a new service,
• Imposed post-conflict reconstruction, and
• Outright dissolution.
Demilitarising the SAPS is therefore not a technical problem. It is a political and generational project. The international examples prove it can be done. The South African experience proves that doing it once is not enough. Without constant reinforcement, the institution will revert to the familiar hierarchies of the past.
We Can’t Ignore Our Path
A debriefing process did occur. It was expressed through legislation, institutional restructuring, revised training curricula, the establishment of civilian oversight bodies, sustained pressure from formations such as the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union, and the creation of public accountability mechanisms. The Security Branch was disbanded. The formal mandate was redefined. On these measures, a deliberate attempt was made to mark a break with the past.
However, to assert that the institution was “fully debriefed” is equally misleading. A genuine debriefing entails more than the replacement of structures and statutes. It requires the conscious, sustained interrogation and displacement of an institution’s ethos, values, and operational reflexes. In that deeper sense, the process stalled. The hierarchical, force-first culture inherited from the apartheid-era SAP was never comprehensively dismantled. It did not disappear. It went dormant. Under conditions of political pressure and escalating crime, it reasserted itself, as evidenced by the return of military ranks and the re-emphasis on tactical, militarized doctrine.
The subsequent addition of municipal police services has not resolved this underlying tension. It has not addressed the foundational issue. Instead, it has layered new institutions onto a base that was never fully rebuilt. The result is an expansion of capacity without a corresponding consolidation of the civilian, service-oriented paradigm that transformation envisioned.
The South African experience illustrates a broader principle of Security Sector Reform. A name, a uniform, and a law can be changed within a single legislative cycle. The transformation of institutional culture, by contrast, is a generational project. It demands constant civilian vigilance, leadership committed to the constitutional mandate, and continuous mechanisms of oversight and re-socialisation.
The SAPS today is therefore best understood as a hybrid institution. It carries the legal and constitutional mandate of a public service. At the same time, it continues to operate with reflexes formed in a militaristic and politically oriented past. Until that inherited culture is confronted directly — through consistent leadership, revised training, enforceable accountability, sustained demilitarisation, and coherent coordination across all policing agencies — the project of debriefing remains incomplete.
We Need Change
As we are all aware, balance does not require neutrality about outcomes. So the outcome that we’d like to see is one that favours the people.
Our judgment is therefore be logical, conclusive, and firm that the SAPS is a hybrid institution whose legal and constitutional mandate is democratic. Its operational reflexes, however, remain partly militaristic.
What is obvious is that society bears responsibility to ensure that a post-conflict police service is competently managed, because the way it is managed will shape the security, rights, and democratic experience of the next generation.
Transformation, in this sense, is not a sentiment to be applauded. It is a standard to be met. Until the gap between mandate and practice is closed through sustained leadership, accountability, training, demilitarisation, and coherent coordination across all policing agencies, the project of debriefing remains incomplete.