Hoping, S.A's top cop is not a dirty cop!

The cookie appears to be crumbling for South Africa's former and current top crime busters. We are talking of fomer police commissioner Jackie Selebi who has been sentenced to 15 years in the slammer for corruptly raiding the cookie jar, so to speak. Hot on his heels, in what is threatening to be the same direction, is Bheki Cele, current police commissioner.


The South African Sunday Times, two days ago, carried a headline article saying that Bheki cele has signed a R500-million, ten-year lease for the police to move to the 18-storey Middestad Sanlam Centre in Pretoria, a building allegedly owned by a friend (billionaire business mogul, Roux Shabangu). Further to that, the Sunday Times claims that it has proof that this lease did not go to through the expected procedures of tender, hence if true, it would mean more big-time corruption at the cop shop.


Sad times when the seat of top cop has to be constantly tainted with negative media allegations of corruption. It is even more sad considering that Cele would like to be viewed as the "new sherrif in town," ushered in by President Zuma to slay once for all, the crime and corruption breathing dragon. He is meant to be part of a new squeaky-clean administration that has swept out the previous, allegedly corrupt band of Thabo Mbeki loyalists.


This report becomes even more worrisome as one reads that the agreement is said to have been signed with Shabangu before Shabangu became the owner of the building and that another agreement has been signed to move the regional offices of the Durban police to a building that Shabangu is in the proccess of buying! Bheki Cele has denied that he knows Roux Shabangu and that he only signed a "needs assessement." Cele has said that he will take the Sunday Times to task in the courts and with the South African National Editors' Forum (Sanef), over what he calls false and malicious reporting


Well we sure hope for his sake that Bheki is as innocent as he says he is. We hope that the minister and deputy minister of police that are also to move to the new building will not be tainted. Maybe the lease agreement copy that the Sunday Times claims to have is a fake? Could it be that the staff at the newspaper are actually semi-literate and do not know the difference between a lease agreement and a needs assessment? Is someone out to get Cele and has engineered a false report against him? Or maybe Cele put his signature on a document that he did not read over? As you can see, I am doing my best to cut the man some slack, to give him the clichéd benefit of the doubt. We certainly hope that unlike Selebi, he will not disappoint, or will he?