Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
Evidently the Department is having difficulty in complying with the recommendations emanating from the various investigations. It is this state of affairs that needs to be attended to by senior officials as a matter of urgency, as it reinforces the perception that members of the Department disregard any form of authority. Furthermore, it confirms the view, which the Commission has come across in the prisons, that the members of the Department of Correctional Services believe that no outsider can tell them how to run the prisons if that particular person has never worked in a prison. This attitude of the members in the Department is definitely self-defeating. This is not a new phenomenon.
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