Under the guiding hand of police minister and disgraced former national police commissioner Bheki Cele, the South African Police Service has been increasingly following in the same brutal, corrupt footsteps as its apartheid predecessor.

As then, it does not hesitate to turn on its own. In the early 1990s, a security police officer was murdered before he could expose his white colleagues who were stealing petrol from police stores.

The corruption appetites of the new power elite have “grown with the eating”, according to political analyst Paulus Zulu, and it is the very many police officers who take seriously their oaths of office to report any suspected wrongdoing to management, regardless of who the wrongdoer is, that are in the firing line.

In the Free State, senior administrator Patricia Mashale, is at the front of this line. The usual weapon is dismissal using unfair labour practice or expeditious disciplinary actions, but the way in which Mashale has been targeted by her colleagues during the past few months points to her own life, and possibly the lives of family members, being in danger. She has now heard there are plans to arrest her on a trumped-up charge of perjury and remove her to somewhere far away from her home without registering details on the police system. She fears that they want to make her “disappear”.

As a senior and experienced administrator in a unit dedicated to priority crimes, Mashale has dutifully reported corruption, including irregular...

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