'Why I quit my corporate job to become a cop'

When Colonel Nontando Ndzotyana quit her corporate job to become a police officer, it was because she wanted to learn the intricacies of crime investigations so that she could find the people who murdered her brother.

She traded corporate comfort for danger, duty and deep purpose. Today, she is a force to be reckoned with in the fight to eradicate illegal mining in Free State and her dedication and the unique way she is tackling this challenge has earned her the nickname “Iron Lady”.

“If I had stayed focused on anger and revenge, I wouldn’t be where I am. There were too many unanswered questions. Too much pain. I had to channel it into something bigger,” she says.

Ndzotyana, 46, is the only woman in charge of an Operation Vala Umgodi team in the five provinces that battle with illegal mining: Limpopo, North West, Northern Cape, Gauteng and the Free State.

While being a police officer is something she loves because it challenges her every day, Ndzotyana’s dream was to climb the corporate ladder but her brother’s unsolved murder changed her path.

In 2002, armed with a qualification in marketing management, 23-year-old Ndzotyana arrived in Cape Town to work for Eskom’s marketing department.

However, she was shocked by the crime levels in the city and how many people were being killed. It all triggered memories of her older brother, who was murdered when she was still in high school and whose killers were never brought to book.

“The pain, the rage, the helplessness… something inside me shifted,” she recalls.

“I knew the system needed to change and I needed to be part of that change. I was angry to see how murders go unnoticed there and I thought ‘maybe I need to join (the police) and start my own investigation for my brother and all the other victims.’”

Her family was vehemently against the idea, saying she would be killed in the line of duty.

Despite her parents being against it,  Ndzotyana left her job just a few months into it and applied to to join the SAPS.

She was accepted but kept it a secret from her family. For three years she did not go home to the Eastern Cape and would only call to give them the impression she was still in marketing.

After the passing out parade she drove home clad in full police uniform with a service pistol on her hip to deliver the news in person.

Her father was stunned.

“He began lecturing me, saying ‘I sent you to university and you choose this?’” she says. “But it was too late to turn back.”

With her secret now out, Ndzotyana returned to Cape Town, where her career began. She rose up the ranks and later became the firearm instructor for the police’s tactical unit, better known as Amaberete.

She left the metro after almost 20 years and today she’s the Free State commander of Operation Vala Umgodi, a high-stakes national operation tackling illegal mining syndicates across SA.

She leads a multidisciplinary team tackling illegal mining and says although she is the commander, she does not sit in the office and tell her officers what to do — she is constantly out with them chasing illegal miners.

The job, she said, is dangerous in that some of the illegal miners dig ditches to hide gas cylinders they use in their operations. The danger of that is that while they're busy digging them out, there's a possibility that they could explode, she said.

“Miners — mainly undocumented foreign nationals from Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Mozambique — go to shocking lengths to extract minerals. They hide in sealed containers, crawl through sewage drains and brave collapsing shafts.

“I’ve seen them at night, moving with incredible speed and co-ordination. They carry heavy bags of soil on their backs and still outrun trained officers."

Even warning shots don’t deter them, she said.

“They run faster. That sound drives them.”

To catch them, Ndzotyana had to change her tactics, introducing less-lethal force like using slingshots to shoot them with impact pellets to slow them down. 

“You have to stay a step ahead with fitness, strategy and mental sharpness,” she said.

Despite her many years in the industry, Ndzotyana said she still experiences attitude from male subordinates who refuse to take orders from her.

“Some of the men I lead are rebellious. Sometimes they forget I’m the commander. I have to remind them that I am the Alpha and Omega here. Nothing passes without my say-so.”

Her job, she says, is very demanding, not only physically but emotionally too.

“My coping mechanism is to run. No-one really asks me how I am doing. So, I run marathons.”

Sadly, while Ndzotyana’s skills as a police officer have helped bring many perpetrators to book and given families closure, she never found her brother’s murderers as there were no leads.  She ended up having to close that chapter.

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