KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s recent media conference was nothing short of explosive. In front of cameras and journalists, he accused some of the country’s most senior law enforcement and political figures of actively protecting criminal syndicates.
These weren’t vague insinuations. Mkhwanazi said more than 120 case dockets, many involving politically linked killings, had been pulled from a specialised task team, allegedly under direct orders from police minister Senzo Mchunu, via deputy commissioner Shadrack Sibiya.
Some of the dockets reportedly contained instructions for arrests, but those were shelved. Why? Because, according to Mkhwanazi, the investigation was getting too close to a web of politicians, businesspeople, prosecutors, judges and police officers with ties to a drug cartel operating in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
Mkhwanazi went further. He named names. He spoke of digital evidence linking Mchunu to a businessperson now facing attempted murder charges. He said SA Police Service (SAPS) crime intelligence officers who were digging too deep had been arrested on thin grounds, so essentially purged.
These are damning claims. If even half of them hold up under scrutiny, we’re not just looking at another case of corruption but something closer to police capture. We’re looking at organised criminal capture of the state, right at the heart of our law enforcement.
Mchunu and Sibiya have denied everything, of course. They’ve promised investigations and legal action. But we’ve seen this movie before.
The long, rotten chain of command
SA has a habit of appointing politically connected loyalists to top positions in the police, then acting surprised when the institution collapses into dysfunction.
Take Bheki Cele. He was police commissioner under former president Jacob Zuma before being axed for involvement in a dodgy R1.7bn lease deal. But as is the case with many of the well-connected, that didn’t end his career. President Cyril Ramaphosa brought him back as police minister, and he spent much of his time deflecting criticism and shouting down grieving community members at crime scenes. Under Cele’s watch, policing didn’t improve but decayed further.
Go back further to Jacky Selebi, also a former national commissioner and head of Interpol. And then, a convicted criminal. Selebi was found guilty in 2010 of taking bribes from Glenn Agliotti, a drug trafficker with close ties to organised crime. The Selebi scandal should have triggered serious structural reform. But true to ANC form, it didn’t.
The top police brass have changed names over the decades, but the system has stayed the same: bloated, centralised and vulnerable to political interference.
What unites all these cases (Selebi, Cele and now the Mkhwanazi allegations) is a pattern in which senior police leadership serves political interests instead of the public. The police has become an instrument of power, not protection. Crime intelligence is manipulated, investigations are stalled and task teams are dismantled when they become inconvenient or too close to actually fighting crime.
The public pays, especially the poor
Meanwhile, citizens live in fear. Last year alone, more than 26,000 people were murdered. That is about 75 people killed daily. Rape remains rampant and staggeringly high, with an average of 120 cases reported daily, and those are just the ones that make it to a police station. In many areas, as is our experience at Action Society, people don’t even bother reporting any more. They know nothing will happen.
Poor communities feel this failure the hardest. In townships and informal settlements, where gang control and drug networks run deep, the absence of reliable policing is a vacuum. People resort to vigilante justice, or they live quietly under the rule of local crime lords. The state has, in effect, abandoned them.
When politicians interfere in police work, when cases are buried to protect allies, when officers are purged for doing their jobs, this is the price SA pays. It’s lives lost and justice denied. SA has experienced a gradual erosion of public trust in the police, that has now reached rock bottom.
Break it apart to fix it
The police in its current form is beyond patching up. That much is evident to the majority of South Africans. Officials have tinkered at the edges for too long, with new commissioners, more funding (which costs taxpayer money), better vehicles and tweaking crime stats to paint a better picture. None of it has fixed the rot because the rot is built into the structure.
The police is too centralised and hierarchical, so it is too easily captured from the top down. Real reform won’t come through reshuffles or inquiries. It has to come through decentralisation.
We need to break policing down into smaller, locally accountable units. Shift meaningful authority to municipal or provincial levels. Give communities a direct line to law enforcement, still through politicians but at least politicians who are local and not in Pretoria or parading through the country. We should let provinces run their own crime intelligence and internal affairs units, free from national interference.
This won’t solve everything overnight. But it would make capture harder. It would bring police closer to the communities they serve. And it would restore a sense of accountability because when officers know they are answerable to their neighbours and not a distant, politically connected boss, the incentives change.
If Mkhwanazi is telling the truth, we are staring into the abyss. This is another scandal, yes, but also another opportunity and a very hard reminder that change is needed. SA can’t afford another decade of police inaction, political interference and public betrayal.
The solution isn’t to hope for better ministers to implement better. It’s to design a system that doesn’t depend on their honesty; one that protects the public even when the politicians fail them. We’ve tried everything else. It's time to try actual change.
• Du Preez is with civil rights organisation Action Society, which advocates for justice system reform.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.