- SAPS SMS interviews risk becoming symbolic exercises that reward continuity instead of competence.
- Weak interview panels and poor accountability measures are undermining leadership selection within the police service.
- The SAPS Amendment Bill is presented as an opportunity to enforce merit, independence, and strategic leadership standards.
Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car endures because it captures a quiet but unsettling truth. Movement within a system is not the same as progress. One can comply, perform, and even advance, yet arrive repeatedly at the same destination. That tension between promise and outcome has become an apt metaphor for how leadership selection, professional development, and reform are experienced within the SAPS.
The SAPS Senior Management Service portfolio and interview process was meant to be the members’ “fast car”, a professionalised mechanism to drive the department toward ethical, substantive leadership. Yet, when independence is bypassed, and discernment fails, we find ourselves in a familiar, hollow rhythm. Promoted leaders with no engines move at high speeds toward a dead end. We are still sitting in the same place, paying the high cost of a selection process that offers plenty of momentum but absolutely no substance.
In debates about policing, attention understandably gravitates toward crime statistics, leadership changes, and public confidence. Far less scrutiny is given to the internal processes that determine who leads, who advances, and who is forced to leave. Yet it is within these processes, interviews, competency assessments, and career progression, that the future of policing is quietly shaped.
Testing what the eye cannot see
When I was recently asked during a television interview who I considered suitable for the position of National Commissioner, after the cautionary suspension of General Fannie Masemola, I deliberately refrained from naming an individual.
Instead, I reflected on the metaphor of acid and water, two colourless liquids indistinguishable to the naked eye, yet fundamentally different in consequence. In a functional system, there are instruments to test the difference before anyone is compelled to drink. In a failing system, people drink first and discover the truth later.
A biblical account of Samuel, who was sent to choose a leader and warned against judging by outward appearance, is also instructive. The lesson is not theological. It is organisational. Leadership worth appointing must be discerned, tested, and proven beneath the surface. This is where SAPS currently struggles, not because capable people are absent, but because mechanisms of discernment have weakened.
Interviews without independence
Selection panels within SAPS are frequently criticised for lacking independent members, calling into question their objectivity and credibility. Where panels are internally homogeneous, perceptions quickly harden that interviews are designed to favour candidates who will not challenge the status quo, rather than those with strong credentials, analytical depth, or reformist capacity.
Under such conditions, interviews risk becoming rituals of continuity rather than instruments of evaluation. However, the crisis is deeper than mere bias. It is a crisis of cognitive capacity. We are currently witnessing a phenomenon of the blind leading the visionary.
There is an African proverb that suggests an elder sitting on the ground sees further than a junior at the top of a tree. While this honours the wisdom of age, it is a dangerous fallacy when applied to technical and strategic organisational leadership. In a modern SAPS, “climbing the tree” through academic rigour, specifically achieving NQF 6 or above, is not a luxury. It is the lens required to see the horizon.
Experience cannot be equated with a qualification. Thirty years of experience may simply be one year of experience repeated thirty times, often reinforcing outdated or broken habits. When a panel member lacks the academic framework to understand strategic systems, they become a gatekeeper who drags the organisation backwards. They are unable to discern the very qualities required to modernise the service because they cannot recognise brilliance they do not possess.
Waiting for names to be called
This stagnation is particularly tragic given that we have lived through three decades of a democratic dispensation in an organisation that affords its employees bursaries to develop themselves. There is no excuse for the “NQF gap” in SMS selection processes.
The lyrics of Sankomota’s Papa ring hollowly true for these cohorts, “You’re waiting for your name to be called / 'Cause you never worked for it before.”
We see individuals standing at the finish line of their careers, expecting the reward of senior management based solely on tenure and gatekeeping status, despite having ignored the tools for self-development provided by the state. This is not just a personal failure. It is an institutional roadblock.
Those without the requisite NQF 6 qualifications should no longer sit on SMS panels, regardless of their years in uniform. You cannot judge a candidate’s capacity for policy literacy or strategic systems thinking if you do not possess the vocabulary to define them. These individuals are the gatekeepers of mediocrity, waiting for their names to be called to the highest tables while shaking with disbelief when the world demands more than a uniform.
When assessment failure has no consequence
Recent evidence before the Madlanga Commission laid bare a troubling reality. Individuals could fail SMS competency assessments and still be appointed. This is not a procedural anomaly. It is a collapse of merit safeguards.
Competency assessments exist precisely to protect institutions from executive weakness. When failure carries no consequence, assessment becomes symbolic, process loses authority, and merit becomes negotiable. It is in such environments that institutional scepticism takes root.
For several years, parliamentary oversight bodies have called for skills audits of SAPS senior management. Yet their findings remain largely inaccessible to the public and insufficiently evident in transparent corrective action. This silence fuels perceptions of blind loyalty, insulation from consequence, and resistance to scrutiny. An organisation that does not interrogate its own skills profile cannot credibly claim to be reform-oriented.
The loss of intellectual capital
Perhaps the least acknowledged cost of this environment is the steady loss of intellectually capable members into academia and other sectors. Many left not because they wanted to, but because the system could no longer accommodate them.
Members pursuing advanced qualifications, up to and including doctorates, have been reminded that these are “only papers”, lacking practical value. Such remarks betray a misunderstanding of what it means to be a learning organisation. Research-informed practice, analytical reasoning, and theoretical grounding are not opposites of experience. They are its refinement.
Some of my own students, still active within SAPS, have been explicitly or implicitly advised to look elsewhere, not because of incompetence, but because they no longer “fit” the prevailing culture. Like the narrator in Fast Car, they move not in triumph, but because staying becomes suffocating.
Reforming the SAPS Amendment Bill
With the Amendment Bill in mind, reform must address not only what decisions are made, but how those decisions are structured. This must occur regardless of the underlying reasons for gatekeeping, whether intentional or systemic. Reform cannot rely on goodwill. It must be designed to withstand its absence.
First, selection panels should be statutorily required to include independent members with demonstrable expertise in leadership assessment, organisational governance, and strategic decision-making. Independence must be substantive, not symbolic. External members should carry equal weighting in scoring and deliberation, with dissenting views formally recorded.
Second, competence thresholds for panel members must be clearly defined. While qualifications alone do not confer competence, panels assessing SMS candidates must collectively possess the capacity to interrogate strategic thinking, ethical judgment, and operational complexity. This includes a mandatory requirement for an NQF 6 or above for any individual sitting on an SMS panel. We must stop those lacking the necessary strategic foresight from determining the fate of the visionary.
Third, the Amendment Bill should mandate standardised, competency-mapped interview instruments. Core operational and strategic competencies must be tested through scenario-based questions rather than generic prompts. Any deviation from approved instruments should require written justification.
Fourth, assessment outcomes must be binding unless formally overturned through transparent, documented processes. Where competency assessments are failed, appointments should automatically trigger mandatory review.
Finally, panel processes must be auditable. Composition, scoring matrices, and decision rationales should be subject to oversight by an independent authority.
Beyond the culture of tenure
The implementation of these reforms is about more than just checking boxes. It is about shifting the SAPS away from a culture of waiting toward a culture of earning. For too long, the service has been anchored by those who view seniority as a birthright rather than a responsibility. When we allow individuals without the requisite intellectual development to act as gatekeepers, we are not just stalling progress; we are actively sabotaging the safety of the public.
A police service in a complex, 21st-century society cannot be led by those who are intimidated by the visionary or who dismiss advanced education as “just papers”. Those papers are evidence of discipline, the capacity for high-level reasoning, and a commitment to self-improvement. By ignoring them, we signal to every young, ambitious graduate in our ranks that their growth is a threat to the establishment.
The tragedy of Tracy Chapman’s song is the realisation that the “fast car” was never going to leave the town behind because the drivers were not actually going anywhere. The SAPS Amendment Bill is our opportunity to change the driver, fix the engine, and finally move.
If we fail to enforce these standards now, we will remain sitting in the same place, watching our best minds walk away while we wait for names to be called that should never have been on the list in the first place. Reform succeeds not through perfect intentions, but through systems designed to reward substance over manageability.
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