MICHAEL AVERY: SA is morphing into Colombia as attack dogs stay leashed

Acting police minister Firoz Cachalia has warned — I’m sure dead-eyed and unblinking — that SA could become “the next Colombia or Ecuador”. He reportedly made his comments during an interview on the sidelines of the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation Forum this weekend, as organised crime tightens its chokehold on SA.

But the irony was so thick you could butter it.

Cachalia, after all, is the man who chaired the National Anticorruption Advisory Council (Nacac), the president’s latest experiment in appearing serious about graft. He helped design the Rube Goldberg machine now grinding away in Pretoria: 800 pages of good intentions, a few seminars on ethics, and the same fatal flaw as all its predecessors — it reports to the executive.

The Nacac promised a shiny new Office of Public Integrity but quietly kept it leashed to the president through executive proclamations: “independent” in name, obedient in practice. It’s the same trick the ANC has pulled since it murdered the Scorpions.

So forgive my scepticism about his sincerity when Cachalia warns we’re becoming Colombia.

That we are en route to becoming the African equivalent of a South American mafia crime state is a chilling thought, but it isn’t alarmist. The signs are all about us: assassinations of officials, extortion cartels in construction, gangs running municipal procurement, and a police service hollowed out by political interference.

And what does the presidency offer in response? Another extension of another SIU probe, this time into lottery corruption. It’s the same reflex we’ve seen for years.

The SIU, of course, reports to the president. Just like the Hawks, the Investigating Directorate, the new “Idac”, and every other alphabet soup of “anticorruption” Frankenstein units the ANC has stitched together since it terminated the Scorpions.

This deeper crime was laid out on September 29 by Paul Hoffman and the Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa in a blistering submission to parliament’s ad hoc committee on ministerial interference in policing.

It is the most precise autopsy yet of SA’s anticorruption failure. The pathology report reads like this:

In 2011 the Constitutional Court, in Glenister Two, issued a binding order: SA must create a corruption-busting body that is specialised, trained, independent, resourced, and secure in tenure, the now-famous STIRS criteria.

That body must be outside executive control. Not “semi-independent”, not “in the NPA”, not “reporting to cabinet”. Outside.

Thirteen years later no such body exists. The Hawks, the Investigating Directorate, the SIU, and now the Nacac all answer, directly or indirectly, to the same executive they’re supposed to police.

This failure is unconstitutional. Parliament’s inaction is a standing violation of a Constitutional Court order, which is, in effect, a slow-motion contempt of court.

Hoffman calls it “the grand delinquency of parliament”: a deliberate refusal to obey the highest court in the land because obedience would mean surrendering political control of the levers of impunity.

Ramaphosa’s extension of the SIU’s lottery probe looks like action. In reality, it’s a political placebo. Another executive-controlled agency nibbling at corruption one headline at a time while the machinery of impunity hums beneath.

Instead, for 13 years, the ANC has ducked, delayed, and devised diversionary structures. The reason is that genuine independence is heresy to the national democratic revolution’s project of “hegemonic control of all levers of power”.

How can you “fight corruption” when your chain of command ends in the same cabinet that authorises the tenders through its members’ henchmen in the public service?

Hoffman’s submission to parliament puts it bluntly: “Our law demands a body outside executive control to deal effectively with corruption. No such body exists. It is the constitutional duty of parliament to legislate one.”

Sadly, Cachalia’s Colombia comparison wasn’t hyperbole. Political assassinations have become routine, from tender disputes in KwaZulu-Natal to whistleblower hits in Gauteng. Babita Deokaran’s killers have been jailed, but I’m told by a businessperson working with the government that the rot in healthcare runs much deeper than Thembisa, and the masterminds are still at large. The same is true for Cloete and Thomas Murray, gunned down while investigating criminal liquidation rings. And for insolvency lawyer Bouwer van Niekerk, executed in his Saxonwold office earlier in 2025.

And here’s where business must stop pretending it can outsource this fight to lawyers.

The same business community that rallied against state capture, through the CEO Initiative, BLSA, and later B4SA, must now do so again. Back then, it was about junk status. This time, it’s about junking the rule of law.

I’ve been banging this drum a lot lately, but only because I believe there are few more important issues to solve if we are to bring this country back from the brink. The DA’s Glynnis Breytenbach bills before parliament offer a real solution in the form of a Chapter 9 Anticorruption Commission, fully independent, constitutionally enshrined, and reporting to parliament, not the president. The design already exists. What’s missing is political will and business pressure to make it happen.

And this is hardly a partisan or political cause that business can be accused of adopting; it’s the legal minimum for a functioning democracy.

Meanwhile, the president will keep extending SIU mandates. Ministers will keep commissioning “multi-agency task teams”. The Hawks will keep circling the same carcasses, toothless and tired.

Cachalia’s warning should echo through every SA boardroom for what the price of inaction portends but also for the price we could pay if the wrong action is taken via Nacac.

Parliament has one chance left to redeem itself by passing the Breytenbach bills and creating a truly independent Chapter 9 Anticorruption Commission.

We are not Colombia yet. But if we don’t build what the constitution demands, we’ll keep dancing to the band’s tune in a burning casino until, at last, the mob claims the table, the dealers, and the house itself.

• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.