Too Trusting

On the advent of our new democracy in South Africa, it was said that we had the most exemplary system of government in the world. Perhaps we did and still do. But it is, in my view, far too trusting of human nature, and that is written into the system. This is a big problem. The foremost example is (to put it too simply) the trust we place in our president to investigate his own alleged offences. But one finds this everywhere. My own closest experience has been the police. This is how the police deal with their own alleged offences:

• Serious crimes: the Independent Police Investigative Directorate investigates.
• Common crimes: the South African Police Service investigates itself.
• Service delivery: Police Management investigates.

One potential problem here is not hard to see. In the case of common crimes, the police are entrusted with investigating their own conduct, in a large number of cases. This situation of police investigating police might be ameliorated if a police station were not to investigate offences committed in that same police station. But what happens is that police stations often investigate their own officers -- and officers, in the very nature of police work, often act in concert with other officers. In other words, it is often the case that offences are not committed in isolation. Touch one officer, therefore, and you may touch the station. OBSERVATION: There isn't room here for examples -- but the focus of this post is again: our whole system in South Africa is too trusting of human nature -- and this rests in turn, I think, on our people. We are too trusting in general. Also, consider the burden that this places on the people who handle alleged offences. They are placed in situations of great tension. It is not good for their own wellbeing, apart from that of the public, to have any influence over their own accountability.