‘In Mpumalanga everything is giant — the crocodiles, the snakes, even the bees are big enough to shoot’

Police diver Capt Johan “Pottie” Potgieter had a fairly interesting day at work last Saturday.

He was lowered by helicopter into crocodile-infested waters to hoist out the 500kg carcass of a euthanised Nile crocodile suspected of eating a missing businessman.

But after taking part in the macabre operation — the croc was found to have human body parts and six shoes in its belly — he shrugged it off as “just one of those things that happen all the time here in Mpumalanga”.

Potgieter heads the five-person White River police diving unit, the lowveld team tasked with water rescues, recoveries, drownings and river searches.

The operation, which involved tracking the reptile by drone for days before it was shot and hauled from the Komati River, was covered worldwide. Footage of Potgieter dangling beneath a helicopter during the dramatic recovery went viral.

“Here in Mpumalanga everything is giant — the crocodiles, the snakes, even the bees are big enough to shoot,” he said.

Mpumalanga averages a drowning every three days, and Potgieter has spent decades working the province’s rivers and dams.

A career cop, he joined the South African Police Service in 1988 and qualified as a diver in 2008 — a job he loves despite the punishing hours, emergency callouts on birthdays and at Christmas, and operations that can keep him away from home for days.

It is a life shared with his wife, Joey, who serves alongside him in the same diving unit.

“Some of the jobs are not lekker, hey. Sometimes we tie Joey by her feet and lower her upside down into pit toilets or sewerage to pull out dead babies,” he said. “It’s disgusting. There’s times when you wade through knee-deep piles of stinking baby nappies and sh**. That’s the only part I really hate.”

The rest, he says, is exactly the life he wanted.

“I went into the police and I got to do what I always wanted to do. I’ve never been disappointed and I’ve never wanted to do anything else. I even get to work with my wife, who knows and understands the job and works with me.”

Potgieter started scuba diving as a hobby before discovering the police had a use for divers.

“In those days you used to be based at your station,” he says. “They would round up a bunch of us for a call, and after that you would all go back to your stations. But then drownings picked up, and the response times were long because of the distances we would have to travel.

“Sometimes we would be away for days at a time. And so they set up proper dive points at the unit where we are based now in Nelspruit and Middelburg.

“We were 14 in the beginning, but now we are down to only five, and I would say we actually could do with about 20 people.”

The unit handles between 125 and 135 cases a year, many of them gruelling multi-day searches.

“Not all the calls are just simple scenes. Sometimes an operation can take five days or seven days. One case in Blydepoort took eight weeks. My longest was three months to find a body that had been trapped under freezing-cold water and was fully preserved.”

The work ranges from body recoveries and missing persons cases to anti-poaching operations, illegal fishing investigations and searches for evidence.

“You see a lot of strange things actually. Sometimes you get called out to find a missing person who people say ran away, and then you find him drowned with his legs tied together.

“Sometimes a person gets washed away, and you find them safe days later and far away because they managed to climb into a tree.”

The calls come relentlessly, mostly over weekends, and much of the work is dangerous. Lately, Potgieter has started taking his teenage children along on operations.

“My wife doesn’t like it, but I reckon they must grow up at some point and they need to know what the world is really like. So they have a few bodies under their belts,” he said of his 16- and 18-year-olds, who both dislike his work.

“But everyone in the house knows if a call comes in then we have to go. If the kids don’t want to come, we drop them off at friends. But somehow it all just works out.”

Mpumalanga police spokesperson Brig Donald Mdhluli said DNA tests on the human remains retrieved from the crocodile began on Thursday, and results are expected in about 40 days.

The missing man is 59-year-old Gabriel Batista, owner of the Border Country Inn near the Lebombo border post. He disappeared after his Ford Ranger was partially swept off a bridge on April 27 — triggering the hunt for the giant crocodile. His family have asked for privacy as they await DNA confirmation on the body.

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