KOSHEEK SEWCHURRAN: How SA’s outdated leadership has dismantled modern policing

In a country where genuine public sector innovation is rare — and results even rarer — the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) was a quiet triumph. It brought police, prosecutors, intelligence and correctional services into a single co-ordinated structure that worked. It solved politically linked murders, protected whistle-blowers, and proved that even in a failing state collaboration could produce competence.

And then there was an attempt to kill it. Not because it failed, but perhaps because it worked too well. The PKTT was not another temporary task force chasing headlines. Over five years it evolved into one of the most effective interministerial collaborations the SA Police Service (SAPS) has ever seen. It achieved one of the highest case resolution rates in the country, cracked complex political assassinations, and built bridges across agencies long known for turf wars. It nurtured and matured real capability, as we would say in management.

It was, in effect, a matrix organisation inside the state: SA Police Service (SAPS), Hawks, National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and crime intelligence sharing leadership, authority and real-time information. It worked through dialogue rather than rank. It was dynamic, adaptive and self-correcting — the very features bureaucracies are designed to suppress.

But that was also its weakness. To police minister Senzo Mchunu and a few others, this model looked like chaos. It didn’t fit the SAPS organogram. It couldn’t be controlled from a single desk. It operated through shared accountability rather than command. And so, on December 31, with no briefing, no consultation and no warning, Mchunu ordered it disbanded.

Read: Mchunu takes full responsibility for directive disbanding political killings task team

He called it an administrative adjustment — a routine closure of a temporary team. But legal compliance is not the same as good governance. Leadership is more than ticking boxes; it is the courage to protect what works. In a state that hides behind procedure, legality often becomes a substitute for morality — a way to look orderly while dismantling what delivers results. In that sense, the decision was not merely bureaucratic; it was existential — a retreat from imagination to uninterest.

‘Teams of teams’

The PKTT’s structure wasn’t radical by global standards. It was simply modern. Matrix organising is how institutions tackle complex, cross-cutting challenges that defy silos. It is the default model for disaster response, cyberdefence and transnational crime-fighting around the world. The familiar pyramid — a structure built on layers, reporting lines and tidy accountabilities — is giving way to more fluid forms: matrices, helixes, federated networks and “teams of teams”.

These designs promise responsiveness and innovation, but they also distribute authority into webs of dotted lines, capability hubs and transient alliances. The hard question for business executives is no longer which structure is best, but how they maintain control of a living centre of purpose, culture and accountability when power is dispersed. Can we afford to have a police minister who does not get this?

Read: Political killings task team was not meant to be permanent, says Sibiya

The UK’s National Crime Agency uses squad-based interdisciplinary teams — combining investigators, financial analysts and prosecutors — to dismantle organised crime and corruption. Their success lies in collaboration across institutional boundaries, not in orders cascading down a hierarchy.

The PKTT functioned the same way. It wove together the technical, legal and intelligence dimensions of political killings. It adapted pace and focus to the realities of each case. It didn’t wait for permission to act. In a state defined by bureaucratic paralysis, it represented something rare: self-organising willingness. PKTT showed that innovation could thrive within the state; that collaboration could beat corruption. And that made it a political liability.

System left blind

Mchunu justified his decision by arguing that it was not visible on the organogram. He argued that the PKTT’s budget should be redirected to provinces for “visible policing”. On paper, it sounded plausible: more police on the streets, more safety for citizens. In practice, it was a profound misreading of how organised crime actually operates.

Political assassinations are not random street crimes. They are the terminal symptom of systemic corruption — of procurement mafias, local political turf wars and criminal infiltration of state security structures. Redirecting money from an elite, intelligence-driven task team to general patrols is like turning off radar to buy more uniforms. It may look good on television, but it leaves the system blind.

Redirecting money from an elite, intelligence-driven task team to general patrols is like turning off radar to buy more uniforms.

International precedent confirms this. In Italy, the anti-Mafia task forces integrated prosecutors, financial investigators and intelligence officers into specialised national units. Colombia’s war against the cartels succeeded only when its centralised, inter-agency command fused intelligence and enforcement. In every case reform demanded strategic depth — not shallow optics.

SA had that in the PKTT. Then leadership, either through naivety or malice, chose to disestablish it. Mchunu’s leadership style is emblematic of a deeper malaise in the public sector: a belief that control equals competence. His reflex was to retreat to formality — to the comfort of bureaucratic order — even as that order was illogical in terms of modern good practice.

He told the ad hoc committee that he wouldn’t meet the task team because “there is no such structure in SAPS”. That sentence captures everything wrong with bureaucratic leadership. His decision may be defensible in bureaucratic law, but governance cannot be measured by procedure alone. What SA faces is not a legal problem but a philosophical one: can public institutions adapt to complexity to meet reality? Leadership that hides behind the letter of the law to avoid the spirit of progress is not lawful — it is cowardly.

Read: ‘Case study in failure’: Deputy police minister lambasts task team disbandment

Even Mchunu’s deputy, Cassel Mathale, admitted he initially thought the disbandment letter was a hoax. There was no performance review, no transition plan and no strategy for integrating the model into the SAPS. In competent systems, innovation is absorbed and scaled, not neutralised.

The timing of the decision by Mchunu is telling. In the weeks before the disbandment, the PKTT had arrested politically connected suspects and re-opened sensitive dockets. According to Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s testimony, 121 case files were abruptly removed from the task team and transferred to another office. They were only returned months later, after Mchunu was placed on leave.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But when a team closing in on powerful interests is suddenly dismantled, coincidence starts to look like cover. The request to shut down the PKTT reveals the hollowness of a leadership culture, the inability to look at innovative organising that is able to deliver justice.

The PKTT shows that SA policing could work like a modern system — adaptive, integrated and accountable.

The request to disband the PKTT demonstrates how little awareness there is of building modern organisations in the public service. While a legal perspective currently dominates the enquiries, the perspective needs to be widened to appreciate modern organising innovations that seek to grow collaboration as well as capability. The PKTT shows that SA policing could work like a modern system — adaptive, integrated and accountable.

As ANC chief whip Dumisani Ntuli asked in parliament, how could the ministry justify undoing a functioning interdisciplinary team from one ministry? Neither Mchunu nor Mathale had an answer. This showed how out of touch they both were.

The PKTT was more than a policing experiment. It was a glimpse of what governance could be if the state embraced matrix organising as a philosophy — inter-agency collaboration, shared accountability and distributed intelligence. It offered a model for climate response, infrastructure delivery and even education reform. It held the centre not through hierarchy, but through trust, leadership and shared purpose.

Mchunu didn’t just seek to dismantle a task team. He dismantled an idea: that SA can still govern itself through competence and collaboration rather than control and fear. The PKTT’s success proves that when you give professionals autonomy and strong leadership, they can deliver results.

•Sewchurran is a leadership scholar and educator at the UCT Graduate School of Business. He writes on leadership, strategy, governance and the moral dimensions of public innovation.