BARNEY MTHOMBOTHI | Why does combating crime seem too much for the SAPS?

I’ve just about had it with the PKTT. The police unit set up to combat politically motivated killings in KwaZulu-Natal has become all the rage, dominating daily conversation, if not our lives. Only those hiding under a rock these past few weeks could have missed hearing about the political killings task team.

Its full name is a bit of a tongue-twister — perhaps that’s why everyone takes refuge in its acronym. South Africans are generally fond of acronyms; they’re practically our 12th (or is it 13th?) official language.

Still, saying the full name aloud can feel a bit unnerving. It sometimes sounds as though the team themselves are carrying out the killings, rather than preventing them. Then again, in KwaZulu-Natal the police do have a reputation. But that’s a story for another day.

Listening to the proceedings of the Madlanga commission of inquiry into criminality, political interference and corruption in the criminal justice system often sounds like “PKTT this, PKTT that” on repeat to an audience that just a month ago probably thought PKTT was a scrumptious brand of chips.

One often gets conflicting vibes about the inquiry, which, I suppose, is not a crime. The Madlanga commission is a necessary intervention; vital, even pivotal, not only to cleaning out the Augean stables, as it were, but also to shaping the political direction this country could yet take. But one could also feel that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is slipping away. No fault of Madlanga. He’s been tasked with investigating and proffering solutions to a specific problem, and one has no doubt he’ll do so with the rigour and diligence that have marked his years on the bench. The real question is not whether Madlanga will do a good job, but whether President Cyril Ramaphosa will somehow defy conventional wisdom and act on the judge’s recommendations.

The issues before Madlanga aren’t happening in a vacuum; they’re part of a bigger whole. And it’s a bottomless hole we’re sunk in. Even the PKTT — whose disbandment has become the ubiquitous nub of this inquiry — cannot be viewed in isolation.

The issues before Madlanga aren’t happening in a vacuum; they’re part of a bigger whole. And it’s a bottomless hole we’re sunk in. Even the PKTT — whose disbandment has become the ubiquitous nub of this inquiry — cannot be viewed in isolation. Crime is at the heart of the matter. It’s the overarching blanket under which our pathologies have taken cover, the national crisis that nobody seems to care about. Ever-present in our lives, we’ve become inured to its repercussions, and the authorities have conveniently averted their gaze.

One can almost gauge what Ramaphosa and his government consider important by the issues he chooses to probe through commissions and task teams. Sometimes such inquiries are appointed for no reason other than to run out the clock or kick the can down the road. Ordinary people have been living with crime for years, but he’s never once considered appointing even a modest inquiry to look into why his government has so completely failed to curb it — not even a special session of parliament.

It was only when politicians — those with a voice in the halls of power — began to be killed that Ramaphosa was moved to mandate an interministerial committee, which created the PKTT. No expense, it seems, was spared to sustain it. And now, of course, we have a full-blown inquiry to look into why it was surreptitiously disbanded.

Not that the killing of politicians should be of no concern to us — it is, and it should never happen. But it ought to be tackled as part of the crime wave that’s been gripping the country for years. As the public is being regaled and appalled by some of the revelations emerging from the two inquiries — Madlanga’s and the ad hoc parliamentary committee — a picture is beginning to emerge of a police establishment consisting of the good guys and the bad apples. On the one side, KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi — the man who caused all the trouble — and on the other, Senzo Mchunu and Shadrack Sibiya, who comes across as rather a slippery character. It’s beginning to make sense why the police, despite all the resources ladled out to them, aren’t able to get on top of the crime wave: some of them are on the payroll of criminal syndicates.

The public generally has never had a good word for the police, and it’s no secret why. This is the first time the police hierarchy has been dragged, reluctantly, before inquisitors in such public forums. It would have been very useful, for instance, for the public to hear national commissioner Fannie Masemola — or even Mkhwanazi himself — explain why combating ordinary crime seems a bridge too far for them. Why does the country have one of the highest crime rates in the world? Why is it more violent than countries caught up in a civil war? Why is a woman raped every six minutes? Why? Why?

Dumisani Khumalo, who’s been exposing the misconduct of some of his colleagues, should, as head of intelligence, be explaining why the police are so hopeless at anticipating criminal activity. He told the commission that the PKTT has been so successful it ought to be replicated nationwide. But where was this vaunted task team when the insurrection erupted in KwaZulu-Natal in July 2021, leaving hundreds dead and businesses and infrastructure worth millions destroyed?

And where indeed was Mkhwanazi, our saviour, when KwaZulu-Natal, his domain, went up in smoke? Were the police instructed to hide and not show their faces? It would have been interesting to hear how Masemola and Mkhwanazi dealt with these questions. Nor were such questions put to Bheki Cele, the police minister at the time, who praised the SAPS for sitting on their hands during the insurrection. The public could be forgiven for thinking the criminal underworld were behind the insurrection, and the police — in doing nothing about it — were merely dancing to their tune.

Crime has been the bane of our lives for years and has to be tackled head-on, seriously and consistently, instead of being tinkered with at the edges.