MAKHUDU SEFARA | Politicians, police and other mischief-makers on the run from accountability

Thousands of people took to the streets of Soweto yesterday, pounding the pavements in the iconic marathon. While these runners tested their endurance, it is a different type of running — mostly done by politicians, police and other shady types — that I ponder about.

I do not know whether Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, the daughter of former president Jacob Zuma, occasionally takes to the streets to run normal races. But when the MK Party announced her resignation from parliament in the wake of a scandal over young men sent to the “red zone” battlegrounds of Ukraine, I knew she had decided to run.

Zuma-Sambudla’s resignation as MP serves to shield her from parliamentary scrutiny, but not from potential criminal culpability. It means she doesn’t have to worry about the parliamentary ethics committee looking into her conduct, which her sister Nkosazana Bonganini Zuma-Mncube found so dreadful that she opened a case against her.

Seeing the movie unfold in parliament about how suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu is ensnared is enough to make anyone want to run. While the Madlanga commission into police malfeasance is clinical, the parliamentary version of the same inquiry is rowdier, laced with posturing and copycat lawyer conduct such as “I put it to you”. Zuma-Sambudla surely doesn’t want any MP putting anything to her. Run, Duduzile, run. See if daddy will save you if those boys don’t return home.

Zuma-Sambudla surely doesn’t want any MP putting anything to her. Run, Duduzile, run. See if daddy will save you if those boys don’t return home.

At a farcical press conference this week, the party’s national chair, Nathi Nhleko, he of “firepool” infamy, tried his darndest to shield Zuma-Sambudla from accountability. Asked why she could not explain herself at the presser, he said: “You want comrade Duduzile to stand up and implicate herself?”

The question is less about whether she helped take these young boys to Russia than whether she received anything in return (such as money, which would make her a mercenary-in-chief), and if she knew that these boys, who were told to stop whining and pull up their balls, would be made to fight alongside Russian troops?

If she had absolutely no knowledge of their participation in the war, what’s wrong with saying that to the media at a press conference at which she is present? Unless, of course, she knows her truth to be much more complicated. On that premise, Zuma-Sambudla’s silence is perfectly understandable. When you are on the run, saying anything at a press conference could be incriminating.

If she is as powerless to help as she claims, how did the three boys connected to Nelson Mandela make it out of Ukraine? This is Animal Farm unfolding before us in 2025: if your surname is not Mandela your life isn’t worth saving from a war you didn’t want to partake in?

At the same time, the MKP, which is mostly an assembly of mischief-makers, may have also decided to run, distancing itself from Zuma-Sambudla without shaming her. Everyone in the party is aware that the last person who tried to take her on — Floyd Shivambu — ended up having to quickly cobble together another political home for himself.

The MKP, which is actively participating in the Mchunu evisceration in the parliamentary ad hoc committee, would naturally be loath to engage in a similar enquiry into Sambudla-Zuma. So the party bosses were quick to tell us how the MKP itself is not involved at all in the sorry saga.

Elsewhere, Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala’s testimony at the ad hoc committee hearing in Kgosi Mampuru Prison this week was interesting in how it showed that he, too, is a man who has been on the run. And now seems tired. The many cases opened against him that ended up closed tell a clear case of a cat on the run and saved, intermittently, by corrupt police officers.

But, importantly, his entanglement with former police commissioner and police minister Bheki Cele came because he was running away from other police officers he believed were “harassing” him and stealing from him. This is why he needed protection from Cele, to whom the police were still loyal, regardless of the arrival of the new chief, Mchunu.

Matlala also testified that in his run from the bribe-thirsty cops he met Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi in April at The Pearls in Umhlanga, a meeting organised, surprisingly, by Cele. Mkhwanazi allegedly not only agreed to help Matlala get his purchase orders flowing but also warned him that it was Lt-Gen Lineo Nkhuoa, the SAPS head of human resources, who was allegedly corrupt and demanding kickbacks.

The once talkative Cele has gone to ground, not responding to reporters’ requests for comment after Matlala’s testimony

After this, Cele, a slimy cat happy to receive freebies on retirement that he did not need to declare, allegedly started asking Matlala for a R1m bribe, indicating that he was “not alone” in this extractive behaviour. Cele must now say who the others are.

The once talkative Cele has gone to ground, not responding to reporters’ requests for comment after Matlala’s testimony. He, too, is firmly on the run. For Matlala, though, there’s nowhere to run in his Burberry shoes in prison. But the Matlala/Mkhwanazi/Cele nexus requires further illumination, just as Mchunu has difficult questions to answer.

In the broader Madlanga and ad hoc committee’s stratosphere, Fadiel Adams, leader of the National Coloured Congress, put it best: “We’ve got criminals running the police service.”

While Khoarahlane Seutloali, a road runner from Lesotho, may have won the Soweto Marathon on Saturday morning, our politicians, police and related mischief-makers are running a different race — away from accountability.