LETTER: Bheki Cele unable to face facts

The challenge by Action Society’s Ian Cameron to police minister Bheki Cele in Cape Town refers. Cameron was clearly deeply frustrated and impassioned, but was respectful towards the minister. Few could disagree with his views or his motives.  

But most must surely consider the response, from both the minister and SA Police Service members, as deeply inappropriate, ugly and irresponsible. Being told repeatedly to “shut up” by the minister is bad enough, but to be roughed up, threatened and frogmarched out of the building by the very police Cameron was seeking to defend is beyond the pale. No wonder he has had to resort to the courts for protection.

This is the reality of how Cele’s goons deal with honest and passionate criticism. This is what the man long known as “The Stuffed Hat” orders his jackboots to do when a frustrated but honest SA citizen speaks truth to power. It is straight out of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts playbook; a mirror of Benito Mussolini's fascist Italy.

Cele and his goons are taking us down the road to Nazi Germany, and the police who were present are either too stupid or too compromised to realise that Cameron was speaking up for them.

Where is our president in all of this? Cyril the Silent. Where is a single dissenting voice in the ANC? And where is the DA shadow minister who replaced the effective and impressive Diane Kohler Barnard?

All it takes for evil to triumph us for good men and women to do nothing. Cameron cannot be left alone and unprotected.

Mark Lowe 
Durban

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