IN an unprecedented move Nelson Mandela's government has appointed a leading businessman to head the police service and help forge it into an effective crime combating force.
The appointment of Meyer Kahn, chairman of South African Breweries, as chief executive officer of the South African Police Services (SAPS), comes amid mounting concern over the apparent inability of the police to check rampant crime in post apartheid South Africa.
Crime is the most serious defect in the nonracial society which is slowly emerging after Mr Mandela's African National Congress triumphed in the watershed elections of April 1994. one which the government has so far been unable to excise.
Mr Kahn (57) brings to the SAPS highly honed managerial skills, having made South African Breweries a successful international company with interests right across the world and secured for it a seemingly impregnable position in southern Africa.
A "people person" who is the antithesis of the aloof industrial notable, Mr Kahn sums up his immediate objective with characteristic lucidity: "I am going to make sure that the police have the resources, the support and the motivation to make the streets of South Africa safe again."
The phrase is bound to strike a response in the collective South African psyche; almost every adult in South Africa has either been directly accosted by criminals in the streets or knows of someone who has hijacked, mugged, robbed, raped or assaulted.
Mr Kahn's appointment con verges with another critical decision: the lifting of the moratorium on the recruitment of police officers beyond the present level, a suspension which was brought in to help the government fulfil its aim of reducing the budget deficit to three per cent by the turn of the century.
Lifting of the moratorium presages expansion of the 11.9 billion rand (about £1.63 billion sterling) voted for policing in the most recent budget.
Mr Kahn's cooption is a tacit admission by the government that the 140,000 strong police force needs to be more effectively managed and psychologically boosted, an acknowledgment which comes after a public squabble between safety and security minister Sydney Mufumadi and police commissioner George Fivaz over who is to blame for the failure of the police to check rising crime.
While South Africans wait for Mr Meyer to take up his new post - his two year contract starts formally on August 1st the quarrel between the two men still echoes in their ears, with Mr Mufumadi talking of "incompetence" and Mr Fivaz countering with charges of "interference".
The seriousness of the crime problem is manifest in different ways, from the emergence of vigil ante movements, of which People Against Gangsterism and Drugs is the best known and most militant, to growing public clamour for the restoration of the death penalty, a sentiment which is supported by a majority of South Africans and cuts across party political divisions.
While police chiefs express optimism from time to time about winning the war against crime, and even produce data to show slight declines in some forms of crime, the public - as Democratic Party leader Tony Leon has observed no longer believes them.
PRONOUNCEMENTS of yet another police plan to combat crime are rejected with scepticism, even derision. The widely revered Mr Mandela is not excluded: he is apt to find his reassurances dismissed irreverently as "hot air" (to quote from a letter to the government by Full Gospel Church).
The words of a niece of Ronnie Bethlehem, a respected economist who was murdered by robbers outside his Johannesburg home, articulate the despair felt by many: "To live in Johannesburg is to live with the risk of arbitrary and uncontrolled violence ... There is a real danger that the goodness we have built (in post apartheid South Africa) is slipping away.
The appointment of Mr Kahn has, however, rekindled hope in the minds and hearts of many of his compatriots, perhaps because it is an imaginative move free of party political chicanery.
Mr Kahn has stirred a middle course, expressing confidence in his ability and that of the SAPS to met the challenge ahead while stressing that he is not a magician. "I am a manager, not a messiah," he says.
Mr Kahn identifies four elements in his approach to management: people, structures, resources and leadership.
Extrapolating from his replies in an interview published in the Financial Mail, he believes success depends on getting the right people - a process which may mean training or inspiring existing staff creating appropriate structures to control and use their skills, providing them with the right resources and motivating them.
"Once you have those things in place, you're a winner," Mr Kahn states confidently. He repeats his earlier message: "Until our streets are safe, nobody will be able to do anything with any level of confidence."
Judging from public comments by police unions Mr Kahn can rely on the cooperation of the ordinary policemen and women. One of the organisations which welcomed his appointment is the Police and Prison Officers Union, a radical union which not long ago was burning effigies of Commissioner Fivaz to underline its demand for his removal.
Commissioner Fivaz, who was appointed by Mr Mandela because he was one of the few top policeman whose record had not been tainted by association with the dreaded security police under the old regime, has been positive about Mr Kahn.
"Meyer Kahn is going to assist the police service tremendously," he says. "He will free me to devote my time to fighting crime."
The challenge of combating crime effectively extends beyond the SAPS. It involves the whole criminal justice system, from the overloaded and understaffed judicial system to the overcrowded and, often, deteriorating prisons.
After the euphoria produced by the overthrow of apartheid, South Africa may have veered too far and/or too quickly towards the establishment of a human rights culture, leading to the granting of bail to, and lenient sentences, for, hardcore criminals. Legislation restricting the granting of bail for serious offences and providing for minimum, mandatory sentences is in the offing.
Mr Kahn's record suggests that he will concentrate on the task ahead rather than fret about problems beyond his reach.