Programme Director
Premier of North West, Ms T Modise
All MECs Present
All Members of Parliament and Legislature
Acting National Commissioner of Police, Lt. Gen. N Mkhwanazi
All Guests from the South African Regional Police Chief Council Organisation (SARPCCO)
All Deputy National Commissioners
All Provincial Commissioners present
All Divisional Commissioners present
Sponsors: Microsoft SA and Assupol Life
Business Against Crime representative
CPF representatives
Unions present: POPCRU & SAPU
All finalists to be awarded
All alumni finalists present
Members of the Media
Ladies and Gentlemen
Without sounding too philosophical today, Programme Director, please allow me to begin with an inspirational quote from one of the great icons this world has ever seen, the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King once said: “One of the great liabilities of history is that all too often many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change…, but today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change”. With these wise words, I welcome our new acting National Commissioner of Police, Lt. General Nhlanhla
Mkhwanazi, and to encourage you, Lt. General to defy all those detractors who questioned your capabilities and expertise of leading this great organisation of ours, the Department of Police. Detractors must simply adapt to the necessary change as directed by our Government, or to simply adopt silence.
Also, these words of Martin Luther King do epitomise great leadership that has been shown by the South African Police Service (SAPS) Leadership, as led by the Minister of Police, Mr. Nathi Mthethwa, for supporting SAPS Programmes such as these. For, this Programme, the Women Prestige Awards, expresses and encourages the South African Police Service towards innovative leadership, equity and unity, vision and strategy, team work with colleagues and communities, and impactful and meaningful service delivery to the people of South Africa.
We are thus here today, to celebrate our 10 police officers that are recipients of the SAPS Women Prestige Award. We unreservedly focus the spotlight of reward and recognition on you and your loved ones present here. It is indeed my pleasure to extend hearty congratulations to you all.
Having prior read your profiles as winners in your respective Provinces, it became vivid to me that your employment as police officers and civilians within the Police structure, is founded on dedicated and productive work ethic, which should be an inspiration to all other public servants. Your dedication surely must encourage other public servants to go beyond their call of duty and make personal commitment of greater endurance and creativity to address the socio-economic challenges facing our communities.
Indeed, your endurance, commitment and loyalty to SAPS and the Government of South Africa, mean that you have been public servants who have been diversity-tolerant, professional, dedicated, and humble in service, thus contributing to the stated mandate of our Government of working together with communities to squeeze crime to zero. We must acknowledge though that this mandate of working together to speed up effective service to the people is not an easy one.
It remains a challenging mandate for all of us who have public responsibility. For instance, as SAPS Leadership, we have been lamenting about the continuous onslaught on our police officers by shameless criminals. At the same time, our communities continue to express their grief and dissatisfaction on poor service delivered to them, whether through violent, and at times, fatal protests, xenophobia, or vigilantism/mob justice.
This means then that, as public servants and representatives, we are always obligated to seek to keep the vision of working together to speed up effective service to the people, alive, by making impactful development happen in all our nine Provinces, so that we can meet the communities’ expectations and our own as well. Instead of then setting “one-size-fits-all” objectives and plans that are not necessarily addressing urgent needs of the communities we serve, or, to try to do “development dumps – or jet in and jet out of communities with hosts of workshops”, public servants need to seriously think of addressing the needs of an ever changing society to sustain that service.
Programmes and Projects must then evolve to accommodate the inevitable change in our communities. My message then to the organisers of this event, is also to broaden innovation of award criteria, and to include other themes that are not yet covered by the Women Prestige Award. May I then recommend to the convener of this Programme to consider two additional criteria to choose from: that of fighting corruption and xenophobia.
These two issues are posing great threats to two of our fundamental principles of clean governance and tolerance. We must encourage our public servants to be part of programmes that seek to encourage communities to dialogue, to discuss common challenges, to breakdown the misperceptions that create conflict and to find ways to work together for a better life for all who reside in South Africa. So, include anti-xenophobia in your award criteria. Public servants must be encouraged to blow the whistle when they see irregularities, mismanagement and theft of resources meant for the public, especially for the poor communities.
A key challenge in the construction of a credible public service is to uproot corruption otherwise stolen funds/resources that could have been used in poverty and unemployment eradication programmes, infrastructure development projects or other development work. So, include anti-corruption in your criteria of award nomination. As SAPS Leadership, we are confident that the annual Women Prestige Award Programme, inclusive of the two criteria of anti-corruption and anti-xenophobia, will continue improving the SAPS workforce through such qualities as accountability, responsiveness, transparency and efficiency. With these qualities, then Government policies and strategies that are put in place will continue to be effectively implemented, making public service delivery effective and available.
I am sure our award winners did not find it plain sailing when they embarked on their respective life-and-community changing projects. But, the success of these projects means that, you have been constantly opened to innovations to enable you to effectively deal with challenges and changes to improve service delivery. This means we should never expect quick results, as changing attitudes in the realm of community development is not an easy endeavour.
To sustain quality service delivery, public servants must truly be committed in involving people in a collective and inclusive manner, as each person and each community have different parts of understandings, experiences, information and knowledge. We thus, would like to encourage SAPS Managers, who are at the level of Maj Generals and above, to award the winners, who have done exceptionally well, not only with monetary and certification, but also with a life-time award of rank promotion.
It is a fact that most of today’s winners are still gradually working their way through all echelons and ranks within the Department of Police. They are still lowly ranked despite being winners who continue carrying functions with great honor. So, we are saying, work that is directly in line with Government priorities such as those of creating employment and rooting out the evil scourge of rape and other sexual offences, deserve more than a monetary award or a certificate.
I am having in mind here the members of the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit of Limpopo, who did a wonderful job of apprehending and successfully convicting, with multiple life sentences, child rapists in that area.
These police officers deserve more than a certificate. We should pay a life-time tribute to all public servants, winners of today and those who will win next time, who are continuing to inspire the vision of a uniform cadre of public servants who must be multi-skilled, emotional intelligent and enabled to deliver integrated services, and who should move seamlessly between components and communities as service delivery needs dictate.
I would like to say in conclusion, that as we are approaching the observance of 16 days of activism for no violence against women and children, we must also be confident that this programme will further enable the SAPS women’s network to co-operate with SAPS men for change to support one another in their respective efforts to address the evil scourge of abuse against women and children.
I thank you.
Remarks By The Deputy Minister Of Police, Ms Mm Sotyu at the South African Police Service (SAPS) Women Prestige Awards
