MY EXPERIENCE WITH SELECTIVE SECURITY IN SOUTH AFRICA

Today’s opinion piece is a product, of the times, in South Africa, and has never been fully formed or reconciled in my mind. It is still half opinion and half not wanting to know the answer to my observations. To paint a picture of what security looked like in Sandton. Remember we were on the outskirts of Johannesburg) in 1988. We will need to look at what everyday activities entailed. Basically any major store, shopping centre, hotel, theatre or mall required that your vehicle be inspected before entering any parking area.

It was a quick and cursory look see. To determine, who was in the car. Or if a deeper inspection was required. I am sure that profiling was used as the basis for deeper checks. Upon entering a mall or major department store you were made to go through a metal detector. Very much the same, as those in an airport. Clean out the pockets and proceed. The same applied at office buildings. When we entered our building for work each day we were given a metal detector scan. The security services that provided this inspection were polite, smartly uniformed and 100% non-white personnel.

So tell me how is it then that I cannot get a silver coloured piece of lint (deeply embedded in my pocket) thru one of these machines. Yet two of my colleagues were armed every day throughout our stay in South Africa. Nor was this a secret to anyone. They were armed at work. Even though, I never knew, saw or learned of anyone else on our project that carried a weapon at work. One was an engineer (albeit not a particularity good one) and the other was a piping designer.

The designer told us that he had travelled from California carrying his weapon. Come on that’s gotta be BS right? Well it wasn’t. How does this work then? Beats the hell outta me. I spent many hours contemplating the situations whereby I could even pass a dime thru one of these machines and not set off bells and whistles requiring an immediate body cavity search by some wannabe cop.

The best I ever came up with was that they must have had some kind of permit to carry their weapon with them. This satisfies a lot of questions, however I never saw either of these two produce any paperwork and I was with them going thru security many many times in two years. Sleight of hand? Don’t think so. Hand signal, never seen one. So somehow these guys had some sort of clearance, that was not visible to the rest of us, that they either flashed or showed before getting into the lineup to enter the office or mall.

OK maybe that explains South African security, but how then do you explain California to New York, New York to London, London to Johannesburg, it seems like a bit of a stretch to think you could “carry” thru all of this security. As I said I thought about this a great deal and never really did come up with any reasonable explanation. In some ways the answer is probably something that you didn’t want to know about anyway. It probably lies in the fact that these two were most likely part of some US Agency put there under some agreement with the SA government. Could be right? Maybe they had some special pass that they flashed each time they approached security. Maybe?

In any event, to this day, I have never figured it out. However, it definitely is my opinion that security in South Africa was definitely selective, but I still don’t know what the selection was based on.