One of Pieter Groenewald’s first priorities in his new role as correctional services minister will be to visit Mangaung prison in Bloemfontein — the privately run facility from which rapist and murderer Thabo Bester notoriously escaped in 2022.
The department is in a stand-off with contractors G4S over the operation of the prison after it emerged Bester allegedly escaped with the help of several prison officials. The termination of the contract is before the high court in Pretoria.
Groenewald wants answers.
“I want a direct conversation with the CEO [of the prison]. If they are a good private security company on the outside, I need to understand how this happened, because it should have been impossible,” Groenewald said.
“This is another place where my time on the police committee and my knowledge of security protocols will come in handy. Somebody mustn’t tell me there are certain things they can’t tell me for security reasons. To those I will say they mustn’t come with smokescreens. Let’s put the facts on the table. Then we’ll decide how to handle the matter.
“I have the advantage of having spent most of my career on the police committee, which is part of the security cluster. When we discussed police matters, DCS [the department of correctional services] became part of the discussion, so I am not totally in the dark when it comes to challenges the department is facing.”
There are already several issues on his to-do list.
“One our nation’s biggest issues is that criminals are getting away without punishment, and the statistics back me up. Through my experience on the police committee, I can tell you that 80% of criminals do not even land in court. So a criminal has an 80% chance of getting away with a crime in South Africa. That is unacceptable.”
In parliament, he asked then police minister Bheki Cele how many violent crime dockets had been sent back to investigators over the past five years owing to problematic work done in the investigations.
“His official answer was about 1.5-million dockets. And these are suspected murderers, rapists and robbers.
Another major issue is awaiting-trial prisoners. We have about 57,000 in our system. It is one thing when bail is denied, but I find it problematic if an accused is granted bail of R1,000 and can’t afford it
— Pieter Groenewald
“Another major issue is awaiting-trial prisoners. We have about 57,000 in our system. It is one thing when bail is denied, but I find it problematic if an accused is granted bail of R1,000 and can’t afford it. Now we have to house him at almost R1,000 a day at the expense of the taxpayer. We need mechanisms in place to solve this bottleneck, and it will be one of my immediate focus points.”
Groenewald wants to find practical, workable solutions.
“I always say theory is great, but if you can’t apply it in practice, it is worthless. To give you an example, I asked someone if there was a system in DCS that the [good] apples could use to report the activities of the rotten ones. He said, ‘Yes, the previous minister instituted [such] a system.’ He [spoke] of a room where the people could go and talk. I asked, ‘But did it work?’ and he said, ‘Not really. Maybe for three months.’
“If it doesn’t work, we need to replace it with something that does, otherwise we are wasting our time.”
Groenewald is already looking at the possibility of future overcrowding. “I will be very careful before even considering early release, especially for violent offenders, because I firmly believe that you need to serve out your sentence if you are punished for a crime.”
Another focus point will be the rehabilitation of inmates.
“We have to look at our rehabilitation and reintegration practices. Together with this, we have to take a look at the circumstances of sport in the DCS. Most of our prisons have sport facilities, but the question is how [are they] being used?”
But only a grave digger starts from the top.
“We are still in early days, and I need to continue studying up on my department. One of the birth pains is the fact that justice and [the] DCS are not one ministry any more. [Former justice] minister [Ronald] Lamola took his staff with him, so I am left with little to no staff,” Groenewald said.
“The department itself exists, but as a ministry we need to rebuild from the ground up.”
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