JUSTICE MALALA | Revelations at the parliamentary sessions and Madlanga Commission are just the tip of the iceberg

The ongoing Madlanga Commission and parliament’s ad hoc committee hearings into police malfeasance continue to underline that South Africa’s original state capturers have multiplied into a bigger, more sophisticated, and far more dangerous animal. They are everywhere.

The original willing collaborators in state capture, the ANC of the 2010s, have not slunk off in shame either. They have merely learnt how to evade the law better, knowing that those who were captured and soiled South Africa in the 2010s have not seen the inside of a cell, and therefore crime pays. Handsomely.

The testimony shows that criminal gangs have learnt that the path to power is through control of political players. In the same stead, unethical political players and government officials have divined that the path to riches is through selling out their people to ruthless killers and criminals.

Our crime is ravaging our country, and it seems like we are watching this movie in front of us in slow motion, and those of us in power that should be doing something about it are powerless to do anything about it… that the criminals are taking over our country, organised criminals,”

—  National Director of Public Prosecutions Shamila Batohi

Payola is the order of the day. Criminal masterminds have now worked out that delivering cash to police top brass, politicians and high-ranking civil servants is the key to controlling South Africa. And if it does not work, they kill whistleblowers, cops, prosecutors and possibly try to find a way to buy off magistrates and even judges.

“Our crime is ravaging our country, and it seems like we are watching this movie in front of us in slow motion, and those of us in power that should be doing something about it are powerless to do anything about it … that the criminals are taking over our country, organised criminals,” National Director of Public Prosecutions Shamila Batohi told the ad hoc committee last week.

That assessment should chill everyone in the country. This is the country’s chief prosecutor. When even she feels “powerless to do anything” after six years in office, no-one should be under any illusion: we are in deep, deep trouble.

She went on to say that to deal with crime you must have efficient and effective intelligence structures.

“General [Godfrey] Lebeya from the Hawks testified in parliament that they are sitting at a 50% vacancy. How can you fight crime, serious crime, when you have a 50% vacancy rate?” she asked.

Over the past three years I have tried to avoid certain words and expressions, or have used them sparingly and hopefully judiciously, in this column. These are words such as “coup d’etat” and “mafia state”. I have tried to avoid these terms because I think they carry massive weight and even greater implications. We must use them with care and consideration. We must use them without hysteria. They must be expressions that are used to describe concretely what is happening and not to induce fear or cause alarm and harm.

Those who, like me, have shied away from using them must now not shy away from describing our world as it is. A situation such as that which grips our country’s security structures today demands that we use these words to confront the reality that major parts of this country have become akin to mafia state.

The people we elected to office are not in charge — they are either watching helplessly or more likely looting alongside nefarious forces that control them.

I listened to the testimony of Ekurhuleni Metro Police Department spokesperson Lt-Col Kelebogile Thepa at the Madlanga Commission last week. She detailed how she was intimidated, assaulted, menaced and hounded by a policing service that is essentially a criminal gang. That gang is controlled by tenderpreneur “Cat” Matlala at the top disbursing bribes and collecting government work corruptly, the Ekurhuleni metro deputy police chief Brig Julius Mkhwanazi as an enforcer and facilitator of corruption. It leads straight to suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu’s “comrade” Brown Mogotsi and, therefore, Mchunu himself. Mchunu has admitted to ordering the shutting down of the Political Killings Task Team, which was about to arrest Matlala and others for various killings and crimes.

What we are hearing and seeing at the parliamentary sessions and the Madlanga Commission is just the tip of the iceberg. In every locale, in every municipality and every provincial structure (including the Western Cape), malevolent players have bought and corrupted top police officers and entire police units. Protection mafias, drug dealers, tenderpreneurs work in cahoots with local councillors and local police officers.

Action can only come with recognising what peril one is facing. With clarity, we must confront a truth we continue to refuse to fully embrace. We are at absolute rock bottom in terms of the fight against crime. This country is burning.

To turn this around, we are going to have to do what KwaZulu-Natal provincial commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi did with his press conference on July 6: we are going to have to bring some big walls crashing down.

The entire policing and justice system needs to be cleaned out. Fiddling with the system over the years has just made things worse. The only question is whether we have the leaders to even start to dismantle the mess we have now.