There’s a TikTok video of Julius Mkhwanazi, the infamous Ekurhuleni deputy police chief, appearing before the parliamentary ad hoc committee into police gangsterism — and that’s what it is — that cracks me up each time I watch.
It starts with the MKP MP, David Skosana, asking, “Do you have a bachelor’s degree?” To which Mkhwanazi says, “Erm, postgraduate is like a bachelor’s degree,” and when Skosana persists, Mkhwanazi says, “Yes, I did it with them — I started with a certificate.”
What follows is mumbo-jumbo. The illogic is frenetic.
While it’s fun to watch Mkhwanazi exposed for the fraud he is, the question that must haunt us is why someone like him was handed state power in the first place.
This week, the nation asked the same question as many wondered how we ended up with Maj-Gen Lesetja Senona as head of the Hawks in a strategic province like KwaZulu-Natal.
Yet, in the rogue’s gallery, Senona and Mkhwanazi are in good company.
Think of former police commissioner Bheki Cele, or the alleged fixer who seems to need a fixer himself, Brown Mogotsi, or former Ekurhuleni municipal manager Imogen Mashazi, or ministerial chief of staff Cedrick Nkabinde.
You may add deputy national police commissioner Shadrack Sibiya, “not-academic” Mary de Haas and controversial businessman Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala to this list of ignoble characters.
The appointments to key positions of questionable figures must worry us all
The appointments to key positions of questionable figures must worry us all. It communicates the disrespect those in charge of government wish upon themselves and us. If our country respected itself, these questionable figures, for various reasons, would have been kept far away from state power.
We can express outrage and indignation over each name we are exposed to, but the uncomfortable truth is that these horrible people didn’t appoint themselves, didn’t keep themselves in office and didn’t protect themselves from investigations. Many others around them, who still exercise public power, chose them, used them, protected them and ensured our taxes were spent on these “Inglourious Basterds” for years.
Even though the worst of these must be Matlala, so jaw-dropping was De Haas’s performance at the ad hoc committee that even the University of KwaZulu-Natal distanced itself from her.
“For clarity, De Haas is not an employee of the university and is not a professor at UKZN,” it said. This, for them, was crucial to protect brand UKZN.
Matlala, meanwhile, quite aware of his own shenanigans, decided to pursue business through Medicare24 with the police and tells a story of either his audacity or the level of disregard the police attract. With “brothers” like Senona telling him to “take them on”, why would Matlala doubt himself?
When Senona was confronted over a document he shared with Matlala that contained names and ID numbers of police officers, including intelligence personnel, and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ID numbers (and why does he have so many?), he thought he was clever.
“I never thought it contained personal documents. I never read the documents. It caught my eye, and I sent it [to Matlala],” he said this week. If he did not read the document and didn’t think it contained personal information, how then did it catch his attention? Senona is a slimy, slithering type who spews nonsense with a wry smile.
Not long ago, Matlala told us that he paid Cele tranches of R200,000 and R300,000 in a bid to get him to help get the police investigating him and stripping him of his beloved guns off his back. Like a money-hungry lawyer, Cele kept coming for more — until Matlala stopped taking his calls. His target was apparently R1m.
When the “ignobles” know they can’t find better positions and rewards outside government, they stay despite the abuse. If they are unlucky, they get paraded on cameras at commissions of inquiry or parliamentary ad hoc committees while the rest perfect political survival
The shamelessness of someone who, in our country, ought to be a decorated former top cop beggars belief. Not only was Cele a national police commissioner, but he was also a police minister. But today, a jailbird must avoid him because he is extorting him, ostensibly because Cele wants funds to fix his wife’s car. Since Matlala made these claims in November, Cele has gone to ground. Not a word from him. But before he disappeared, he told us he enjoyed staying at Matlala’s penthouse. The cheek!
But how did we end up here?
The reason the worst among us walk the hallowed halls of power is because for many politicians the utility of an adviser like Nkabinde, a brother like Matlala or a comrade like Mogotsi is considered more important than their competence. Also, allegiance to the leader — especially in contested political spaces — is valued more than merit.
In The Prince, Machiavelli posited that rulers are judged by the quality of the people they keep around them. When those at the top of the police command keep a slimy Senono, a Mogotsi, a Julius Mkhwanazi and a money-grubbing Cele, what does it mean?
It seems in our politics there is a heavy reliance on “yes-men” whose entire careers are dependent on those in power. In her studies on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt said politicians had an affinity toward “thoughtless bureaucrats” without deep convictions. In bad environments, those with the right skills don’t even make themselves available for government or political ecosystems because they avoid the friction between their ethics and expertise, on the one hand, and political loyalty and manoeuvring on the other.
Lastly, when the “ignobles” know they can’t find better positions and rewards outside government, they stay despite the abuse. If they are unlucky, they get paraded on cameras at commissions of inquiry or parliamentary ad hoc committees while the rest perfect political survival.
This is how we end up asking ourselves how Senona was not suspended, or if Mkhwanazi has a bachelor’s degree, or how Mogotsi even has access to anyone being driven under blue lights, or how a money-grubber like Cele was ever allowed to move around in a police uniform.
Society must swallow a gob of disgust and swiftly eliminate the bad apples as they get exposed.
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