The skeletons in the closet of the 186,000-strong SA Police Service are bound to crush many in their path as the door is yanked open via the two inquiries under way into the state of the criminal justice system.
The inquiries were prompted by allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal police boss Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi in an explosive July press briefing, where he detailed the capture of the police ministry and crucial institutions by criminal cartels.
President Cyril Ramaphosa set up a judicial commission of inquiry into criminality, political interference and corruption in the criminal justice system chaired by former Constitutional Court judge Mbuyiseli Madlanga, and parliament has set up a multiparty ad hoc committee that is probing the same allegations.
A picture is emerging from testimony before both of long-stifled career policemen seeking to break out of a system that has strayed far from its constitutional mandate and become toxic, corrupt, factionalised, highly politicised — and deadly.
A crucial strand that emerged this week in parliament was the details about suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu’s relationship with his chief of staff, Cedric Nkabinde, which predates his mere six-month tenure as police minister before he took the controversial decision to disband the political killings task team.
That disbandment is at the heart of Mkhwanazi’s allegations, including that Nkabinde played a key role in the move.
Mkhwanazi told the ad hoc committee he knew Nkabinde as an old “colleague” he met through a family member and also detailed how the minister himself came to know the man he would later appoint to his private office.
He said it happened during Nkabinde’s stint as an investigator with the police watchdog, Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid), when Mchunu was under investigation during his tenure as premier of KwaZulu-Natal for allegedly being involved in destroying evidence in a case involving a death.
Nkabinde had introduced Mkhwanazi to Mchunu when he was still water affairs minister, a few weeks before his appointment to the police portfolio — while Nkabinde was unemployed. Mkhwanazi alleges that Nkabinde was a link between Mchunu and underworld players but did not provide detail on his controversial history with the police.
Mkhwanazi testified that Nkabinde called him after being offered the chief of staff job to ask what the post entailed — “he had no clue” what he would be required to do, but Nkabinde and the minister were “very close”.
Nkabinde controversially left Ipid in 2018 after a fallout with its then executive director, Robert McBride. A letter Nkabinde would write to former police minister Bheki Cele was allegedly the reason McBride’s contract at the helm of the police watchdog was not renewed, despite the settlement of a dispute between him and his former boss.
Nkabinde’s time at Ipid was messy. He reportedly misled the commercial crimes court in a matter involving controversial crime intelligence officer Morris “Captain KGB” Tshabalala, whose attorney told the court during a bail application that the investigating officer in the case against Tshabalala had expressed a desire to help him get bail, as the matter against him had been politicised.
Tshabalala, a rogue crime intelligence operative and convicted criminal, had allegedly played a role in illicit spying at the ANC’s Mangaung conference in 2012.
The Ipid investigating officer in that case was Nkabinde, who denied in an affidavit that he had offered to help Tshabalala. In the end, the court found that Nkabinde had “misled the court” about the details of his interaction with Tshabalala’s attorney.
Nkabinde also investigated former national police commissioner Khomotso Phalane and was also accused of changing his stance in that case.
At the time, Ipid publicly alleged that two of its investigators were offered positions in crime intelligence in exchange for undermining investigations against Phalane and making false statements against McBride. One of the two investigators was Nkabinde.
This is the controversial character Mchunu brought into his office as his chief of staff. The question is: why?
• Marrian is a Business Day editor at large.
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