General Bheki Cele is the police minister at the moment.
The South African government’s Department of Police, which includes the South African Police Service, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, the Private Security industry Regulatory Authority, and the Civilian Secretariat for Police, is under the political control of the Minister of Police (previously known as the Minister for Safety and Security).
Since February 2018, Bhekokwakhe “Bheki” Hamilton Cele (born 22 April 1952) has served as South Africa’s Minister of Police. He served as the National Commissioner of the South African Police Service for two years until being suspended in October 2011 and fired in June 2012 due to charges of misconduct.
Additionally, he has held positions in the KwaZulu-Natal Executive Council, the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Legislature, and as Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. He was detained on Robben Island under apartheid and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress.
Cele is still a part of the African National Congress (ANC) and is now a member of the National Executive Committee, which is the organization’s top leadership body. He served as the party’s KwaZulu-Natal branch’s safety and security spokesman for a while in the middle of the 1990s, and in the early 2000s, he was the eThekwini region’s party chairman. Cele was portrayed as Jacob Zuma’s buddy in the 2000s. However, he sided with Cyril Ramaphosa in the contentious ANC leadership elections of 2017.
Cele believes that private persons should not be allowed to own weapons and favors stringent gun regulation. The Firearms Control Amendment Bill, a piece of gun control legislation launched in 2021 under his police administration, has run into criticism from various civil society organizations. Self-defense would not be an acceptable justification for obtaining a handgun license under the proposed law. Since firearms are used in the majority of homicides in South Africa, Cele has justified the Bill on this basis. However, a number of advocacy organizations and attorneys dispute this figure, claiming that the majority of homicides in South Africa are perpetrated with stabbing implements.
