Hogarth was clearly not the only one to find the timing of suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu’s letter disbanding the political killings task team curious.
New Year’s Eve in this country is not associated with serious and official business. Most people are usually not in a state to send or receive any form of written correspondence.
So when KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi and his boss, national commissioner Fannie Masemola, revealed that the letter was written and sent to police headquarters on December 31, Hogarth hoped that evidence leader Norman Arendse would ask about the sobriety of the author on the day.
The good lawyer was too polite to pose the question. But Mchunu seems to have read Hogarth’s mind and the minds of many others who followed the proceedings of the parliamentary ad hoc committee because — unprompted — he volunteered the answer: “I want to assure you that I was sober when I wrote this letter.”
No corner in a rondavel
Mchunu seemed to take serious issue with a suggestion made by Mkhwanazi two weeks ago that the minister was not the author and that the letter was drafted “in a corner” somewhere by yet to be identified dubious individuals. To prove that the letter was his, and that it was not drafted in some “corner”, Mchunu went as far as to say he wrote it at his rural village “in my room, in a rondavel”. He seems to have taken the “corner” comment quite literally.
Cupcakes keep everybody sweet
It is still early days for both the ad hoc committee and the Madlanga commission to decide who is wrong and who is right between Mkhwanazi and his faction on one side, and the suspended minister and Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya on the other. But even this early, one issue that looks set to take centre stage is the role of President Cyril Ramaphosa. The national commissioner says when he approached the president for his intervention, McBuffalo seemed surprised by the disbandment and promised to speak to the minister.
Mchunu, on the other hand, says he had briefed the president about the decision and Cupcake concurred. Could one of them be lying, or is this another case of Cupcake keeping everybody happy by telling them what they would like to hear?
Heads he loses, tails he fails
While the jury is still out on Mchunu’s performance before the ad hoc committee as he is yet to finish his testimony, Sibiya did not emerge from the process smelling of roses. There were many cringeworthy moments, but Hogarth would like to highlight the exchange between him and MK Party MP Vusi Shongwe about a competency test Sibiya took before being appointed a top boss at the Johannesburg municipality. Shongwe asked if he had passed the test.
Sibiya responded: “It’s an exercise where they say to you there’s no right or wrong answer. This is just to look at your character, whether you are strong person, which character you are. You don’t really need to spend time on this thing because there’s no way you will get this right, to say whether you are right or wrong, so I wrote what I wrote and the result came the way it came.”
Shongwe: So did you pass or fail the test?
Sibiya: It does not say you failed or you passed … let me say it was not positive.
Unhappy with the wishy-washy answer, Shongwe pressed harder.
Sibiya eventually relented: “Okay, let’s say I failed.”
Soviet’s labour camp ethos
Ad hoc committee chair Soviet Lekganyane appears to have made it his mission to use the hearings to change public perceptions of parliament as a place of sloth and somnolence. He insists on proceedings starting on time, breaks not being unnecessarily prolonged and members of the committee staying until midnight at times.
Committee members have generally accepted this new work ethic. But when he suggested that proceedings on one of the days could start at 7am, there was a strong objection from one committee member. Hogarth is yet to ascertain if the objecting MP was from the same party as the one caught napping several times on TV when Mkhwanazi was there to give his evidence.
Knowing your Audis from your Aldis
While MPs were quizzing witnesses, police were busy raiding the business premises of one of the key figures in this cops-versus-cops series. Brown Mogotsi, who may or may not be a comradely associate of the suspended minister, was nowhere near his property when they pounced. He would not, however, allow that to rob him of his five minutes of TV fame. Going live from an undisclosed location he sought to impress viewers with his knowledge of Latin and legalese. “In South Africa,” he averred, “we have aldi patrem patrem.” It’s audi alteram partem (listen to the other side), you chancer!
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