Selebi: soiled cop who lived double life

Hindsight is a game worth playing because it is when one looks back that the import of the words and deeds of one Jacob Sello Selebi become much clearer, even if more disturbing.

Selebi’s case offers one of the best case studies of the duplicity and cynicism that is ever-present when public officials abuse the trust given to them for personal gain, however paltry those gains may be.

When measured against his words as national police commissioner, Selebi’s deeds, for which he began his 15-year sentence on Monday, also illustrate corruption’s corrosive effect on the trust citizens have in public officials.

To mark Interpol’s 75th anniversary in 2006, the international crime-fighting body invited Nelson Mandela to address its general assembly in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Selebi was then-president of Interpol and would no doubt have played a big role in securing Mandela’s participation. By that time also, Selebi, as the court records show, was already a pawn in Glenn Norbert Agliotti’s multimillion-rand chess game.

“Criminals are becoming increasingly organised, forming an insidious global web of inter-connected networks,” Mandela said in his message to the assembly. “There is no finer gift we can give of ourselves, no greater calling we can answer than to make the world as safer a place for our children and for future generations.”

Mandela also told the assembly that crime was a violation of “the fundamental right of every person to live in dignity”.

None of the 600 delegates ought to have understood that part of the message better than Selebi.

The very act of approaching Mandela is illustrative of the deception that public officials like Selebi need to camouflage their corrupt deeds. Selebi’s words to the same assembly added salt to the wound.

“I trust that in the process of the election you will be as driven as these outgoing members of the executive committee by one ideal. That ideal is to serve the people of the world in order to reduce the levels of crime around the world, to make this world safer. That when you choose those you would want to replace them … we choose men and women who are ready to serve, not those that are interested in elongating and strengthening their CVs, but those that want to act,” Selebi said.

This double-life defined Selebi’s relationship with Agliotti. The two first met in the early 1990s when Agliotti approached Selebi, then head of the ANC’s social welfare and development, a unit responsible for the relocation of exiles.

Agliotti, according to the court records, was considering setting up a second-hand clothing import business and wanted to donate a percentage of his profits to the ANC to cover the cost of relocating exiles.

They met 12 times, but nothing came of the proposed venture.

Selebi warmed parliamentary benches for a while before being posted to Geneva as South Africa’s ambassador to the UN.

The highlights of his four-year tenure at the UN were his chairing of the 54th session of the UN’s Human Rights Commission as well as the Oslo Diplomatic Conference on a Convention Banning Anti-Personnel Landmines. In recognition of his role, Selebi was awarded the annual human rights prize of the International Service for Human Rights. He received the most nominations from a selection committee made up of the International Service for Human Rights, the International Commission of Jurists, the Quaker UN Office and other prominent human rights defenders.

Agliotti met Selebi again in 2000, after Selebi had returned from Geneva. Selebi had earlier served as director-general of Foreign Affairs and was then national police commissioner. That same year, Agliotti’s girlfriend, Dianne Muller, was involved in a project, African Hope, to raise money for “challenged children”.

At his girlfriend’s behest, Agliotti asked Selebi for police assistance. Selebi obliged and appointed a policeman to liaise with Agliotti.

“The accused (Selebi) was instrumental in getting the involvement in the event of 1 000 police officers and arranging for the closing of some of the streets of Cape Town for a torch run from the Table Bay Hotel to the steps of Parliament,” the Johannesburg High Court found.

“During this time Agliotti had meetings with the accused at the offices of Maverick and at SAPS headquarters as well as in Sandton.”

This is the same man who in his inaugural speech as national police commissioner in January 2000 pledged to eliminate corruption in the police force “so that we can fight crime with clean hands”.

It is easy, and perhaps convenient, to dismiss Selebi as a bad apple in an otherwise perfect barrel.

On this basis, all that society has to do is to design systems in such a manner that bad apples are separated from perfect ones. Just as we have done by charging Selebi and sending him to jail.

If we do so, we will all live happily ever after. Only if it were that simple. A growing body of literature suggests that the bad apple theory is a false reading of moral transgressions such as Selebi’s.

John Darley, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, for example, has described the bad apple theory as useful fiction that enables its propagators to avoid the more thoroughgoing implications of corruption.

“Specifically, clinging to the myth enables us to avoid the realisation that the world of corporate or governmental ethics requires more attention and more painful redesign that the minor housekeeping implied by the course of action involving the eviction of already discovered malefactors from a system that we assume is otherwise working perfectly.”

Darley invites us to consider “some more disquieting narratives” which suggest that corrupt practices are stumbled into.

“This is a disturbing perspective, one that challenges the notion that corruption begins in corruption, that the source of corrupt acts is those individuals who are corrupt and extract corruption from their followers,” Darley wrote in The Cognitive and Social Psychology of Contagious Organisational Corruption.

Another disquieting narrative comes from University of Cambridge zoologist Robert Hinde who argues that one’s behaviour “can rather easily get unhitched from the moral code” which one assumes guides one’s life.

“This can occur because the demands of the various contexts in which people live can affect not only their behaviour but also the criteria by which they guide their behaviour. One can convince oneself that one is behaving properly when others think differently,” wrote Hinde in Bending The Rules: The Inflexibility of Absolutes in Modern Life.

Hinde may explain why Selebi could not, even throughout his trial, understand what was wrong in having Agliotti as a friend. To use Hinde’s framework, the behaviour of Selebi who became Agliotti’s pawn got separated from the moral code of Selebi the crime fighter. Also, to borrow Darley’s narrative, Selebi the distinguished international diplomat merely stumbled into a corruption honey trap set up by Agliotti.

That Selebi became this bad shows the duplicity, cynicism and betrayal of trust that corruption by public officials represents. - The Star