Lesson: graft doesn’t pay - Cosatu
South African former police commissioner Jackie Selebi looks on during his sentencing at the High Court in Johannesburg, South Africa, Tuesday Aug. 3, 2010. A judge sentenced South Africa's former national police chief to 15 years in prison on corruption charges Tuesday, saying he was an embarrassment to the crime-plagued country and the police officers who had served under him. Selebi, 60, was convicted in July after a nation beset by violent crime heard months of testimony about its top cop going on designer shopping sprees with a convicted drug smuggler. (AP Photo/Werner Beukes, Pool) South African former police commissioner Jackie Selebi looks on during his sentencing at the High Court in Johannesburg, South Africa, Tuesday Aug. 3, 2010. A judge sentenced South Africa's former national police chief to 15 years in prison on corruption charges Tuesday, saying he was an embarrassment to the crime-plagued country and the police officers who had served under him. Selebi, 60, was convicted in July after a nation beset by violent crime heard months of testimony about its top cop going on designer shopping sprees with a convicted drug smuggler. (AP Photo/Werner Beukes, Pool)
Cosatu said yesterday it hoped all those who could not explain their large bank balances, or how they had become overnight multi-millionaires, would eventually join former police boss Jackie Selebi in jail.
Reacting to the Supreme Court of Appeal ruling upholding Selebi’s 15-year jail term for corruption for accepting money and gifts from convicted drug dealer Glen Agliotti, Cosatu said the disgraced top cop’s jail time would “serve as a constant reminder to the corrupt elements in our society that it does not pay”.
While expressing regret that “a man with such an impeccable record in the struggle against apartheid” had been jailed for corruptly accepting what was a relatively small sum compared to the amounts looted from state coffers by tenderpreneurs, Cosatu spokesman Patrick Craven added that “corruption is as bad as apartheid was”.
ANC spokesman Keith Khoza, in a rather subdued reaction, said the party would not comment until it had studied the full judgment so it could determine whether there was a need to respond.
But opposition parties, the DA and Freedom Front Plus, urged the government to recover the more than R15 million spent on Selebi’s legal fees.
DA MP Dianne Kohler Barnard said she had written to Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa asking him to start the process.
“The Selebi saga seriously eroded public confidence in the SA Police Service.
“It is now up to the minister of police and acting police commissioner to ensure that the people’s faith in our police service is restored,” she said.
FF Plus spokesman on police Pieter Groenewald said the state had to do everything possible to recover the fees and to revisit the criteria for when taxpayers’s money was used for the legal fees of officials.
He pointed out that during the high court case it had appeared Selebi owned assets of around R3.4m, but the Asset Forfeiture Unit could attach only R320 722.
Welcoming the ruling, IFP police spokesman Velaphi Ndlovu said it “closed this shameful chapter in our history which has severely dented the image of the SAPS and the integrity and credibility of SA as a whole”.
Meanwhile, DA correctional services spokesman James Selfe told Independent Newspapers everybody was equal under the law and that this essential principle must apply to former top cop and Interpol head, Jackie Selebi. - Pretoria News Weekend