One Friday evening in October 2015, police were called to the scene of a shooting in Dumisani Makhaye Village, Empangeni, near Richards Bay.
When they arrived, they discovered the lifeless body of 24-year-old Xolani Nkosi, a member of then KwaZulu-Natal premier Senzo Mchunu’s security detail. Nkosi had been shot multiple times, and the vehicle he was in was riddled with bullets.
He had been off duty that day and had not travelled with the premier, who spent the evening on official business in Ladysmith.
The rumour mill went into overdrive. Within days, Nkosi’s death was being linked to that of uThungulu Municipality deputy mayor Thulani Mashaba, who died three months earlier when his BMW X5 crashed into a concrete barrier on the N2 near Ballito.
Mashaba — who also served as ANC chair in the Musa Dladla region — was a known critic of the premier and reportedly aligned with a faction seeking to oust him as provincial chairperson at the next KZN ANC conference, scheduled for the end of that year.
A popular conspiracy theory held that Nkosi had threatened to spill the beans about an alleged plot to kill Mashaba — and that, as a result, his principal ordered his execution.
The whispering campaign sought to cast Mchunu as a warlord, even resurrecting the story of his brief arrest a month before South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
The whispering campaign sought to cast Mchunu as a warlord, even resurrecting the story of his brief arrest a month before South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
Back then, Mchunu was the ANC’s Northern Natal regional secretary. He was driving to his office in Empangeni with colleagues when one of his bodyguards, Philani Zondi, shot and killed an IFP supporter in the area.
Although all those in the car were initially arrested, only Zondi was charged. He was later found guilty of murder and sentenced to 10 years, serving only 10 months. Subsequently, he successfully applied for amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Even though both the court and TRC proceedings confirmed that Mchunu had played no role in the 1994 killing, his opponents continued to invoke the case to support their theories about Nkosi’s death.
The whispers were beginning to hurt Mchunu politically, with an increasing number of ANC branches showing signs of turning against him as the provincial conference drew closer.
Mchunu soon discovered that the docket had been removed from the local police and the investigation reassigned to a police unit based in Pietermaritzburg. Frustrated, he turned to then police minister Nathi Nhleko for help.
Nhleko’s intervention resulted in two senior detectives from national police headquarters being assigned to the case. Mchunu had also hired a private investigator to help clear his name.
The Pietermaritzburg unit, however, was proceeding with its own investigation and had apparently focused on Mchunu as a suspect in Nkosi’s murder. The private investigator, working with the two detectives from the national office, identified and arrested two suspects, but the case against them was dropped because the Pietermaritzburg unit had not transferred the docket back to Empangeni. Next thing, the Hawks had taken charge of the case and they, too, were zoning in on Mchunu as a suspect.
Months went by. Mchunu lost his ANC provincial chairmanship at the KZN conference to Sihle Zikalala, now public works deputy minister. Soon thereafter, the new provincial executive committee ordered that Mchunu resign as premier.
Mchunu and his supporters saw the hand of then president Jacob Zuma in all of this. Although Mchunu had been one of the chief architects of Zuma’s victory against his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, at Polokwane, his loyalty to the man was put into question in KZN when Mchunu’s name appeared on an anti-Zuma slate for an ANC top six position ahead of the party’s national conference in 2012.
He declined nomination, preferring to throw his weight behind Zuma — who was being challenged by his then deputy Kgalema Motlanthe for the ANC presidency — as per the wishes of the province. But the damage had been done.
Zuma didn’t support Mchunu’s subsequent bid to replace Zweli Mkhize — who had ascended to the position of national party treasurer-general — as provincial chair, preferring Willies Mchunu (not related) instead. Senzo Mchunu, however, triumphed without Zuma’s blessings, paving his way to becoming KwaZulu-Natal premier.
As premier, Mchunu soon found himself at odds with King Zwelithini over the royal household’s budget. The king travelled to Pretoria to lodge a complaint against him, and soon thereafter, party structures in the province began turning on Mchunu.
In response to his removal, Mchunu did two things. Politically, he threw his weight firmly behind the campaign to have then deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa elected as the next ANC leader. Now unemployed and with ample time, he travelled the length and breadth of the country lobbying ANC branches and potential donors for support. He became the Ramaphosa campaign’s de facto national organiser. Among those he came to know during this period was Brown Mogotsi, who worked for the Ramaphosa campaign — colloquially known as the CR17 campaign — as an organiser in North West.
On the criminal justice front, he turned to Robert McBride — the then executive director of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) — to complain about the conduct of the Hawks. McBride put him in touch with Ipid investigator Cedrick Nkabinde.
On the criminal justice front, he turned to Robert McBride — the then executive director of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) — to complain about the conduct of the Hawks. McBride put him in touch with Ipid investigator Cedrick Nkabinde.
The Ipid intervention seems to have convinced the Hawks — who had initially classified Nkosi’s murder as political — to revisit the evidence uncovered by the private investigator, linking the killing to robbery and attempted carjacking.
In October 2017, just two months before an ANC national conference where Mchunu was to be on a Ramaphosa slate as a candidate for secretary-general, two men — Dumisani Cebekhulu and Ntuthuko Mkhwanazi — were nabbed for Nkosi’s murder.
“I’m relieved that people in the province, including Mashaba and Nkosi’s family, will finally know the truth. For a long time, members of the ANC in the province, the Hawks and ordinary citizens were duped into believing that I had something to do with the death of the two,” Mchunu was to tell the Pietermaritzburg-based newspaper, The Witness, on the day.
From that point on, his star began to rise. Although Mchunu never made it to the secretary-general’s office at Luthuli House, narrowly losing by a couple of votes, he cemented his position in Ramaphosa’s inner circle. In December 2022, when the president was apparently considering resigning over the Phala Phala farm scandal, Mchunu was among those who lobbied strongly for Ramaphosa to stay.
At that year’s conference, none of the provinces nominated Mchunu for any of the top seven positions, but he did rank 6th on the list of 80 candidates elected as members of the new national executive committee (NEC).
In the NEC, he is generally seen as part of a shrinking but influential group that backs the president on contentious decisions.
Following the ANC’s disastrous performance in the 2024 elections, provincial structures started arguing that the electorate in the province, especially Zulu speakers, had turned their backs on the ANC because there was no-one from the province in the current top seven.
Hence the lobby to have Mchunu elected either as president or deputy president at the next party conference in 2027. Outside the province, others appeared to be warming to the idea as well. Those flying a kite for a Patrice Motsepe ANC presidency have, at times, posted on social media a line-up that has Mchunu as deputy president.
Mchunu appeared before the ad hoc committee investigating allegations made by the KZN police commissioner, Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, convinced that he would be able to persuade MPs that the general’s main charge — that the minister wanted the disbandment of the KZN-based political killings task team (PKTT) at the behest of a criminal syndicate — was without substance.
On the first two days of the hearing, he must have gone to bed convinced that he had not only done enough to keep his current job as police minister, but also that his presidential dream was bruised but not deferred.
But then cracks began to show over the next two days as MPs — including those from his own party — listened to his answers to their questions with incredulity written all over their faces.
The writing was on the wall for the minister. But if the ad hoc committee members had speared to death both Mchunu’s current career and future ambitions with their sharp questions, it was the next witness — his predecessor Bheki Cele — who was to play the role of both coroner and undertaker.
He came there intending to demolish every argument Mchunu had made — from his ridiculous definition of “immediate” to the highly controversial claim that interministerial committees come to an abrupt end once a term of office of an administration finishes.
Although Cele’s own testimony was troubling, MPs were eating out of the palm of his hand, enjoying his public flogging of his successor’s dead presidential campaign.
The greatest significance of Cele’s testimony, however, is that it points to Mchunu’s presidential ambition as what drove him to seek the financial backing of Matlala’s questionable wealth.
If proven true, the allegations would underscore just how vulnerable South Africa is to infiltration and manipulation by criminal networks and other nefarious groupings, largely because of the unregulated funding of internal party elections.
If what we are hearing from the ad hoc committee and the Madlanga commission is true, it suggests that a dangerous criminal syndicate not only captured a police minister, but was on the verge of seizing control of the entire government — with a deputy president, or even a president, in its pocket at the Union Buildings.
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