Like anybody else who has been accused of a crime but has not been found guilty by a court of law, former Johannesburg mayor Kabelo Gwamanda has a right to be presumed innocent.
However, the very idea that the country’s biggest city — its commercial capital — has possibly had a swindler who preyed on the poor serving as its mayor says much about the state of our politics.
According to reports the former mayor, who currently serves on Johannesburg’s mayoral committee, was arrested following a complaint by a woman who took out a funeral policy with a company he established many years before he was in the spotlight as a local politician. The woman and many others allegedly lost their savings when the company, Ithemba Lama Afrika, suddenly closed down.
They were apparently given the impression that Gwamanda and his partner in this business had “both died”; the complainant was surprised to see him, about a decade later, appearing on TV as the city’s mayor.
Is this what our politics has come to — that con artists and other shysters believe it is safe to try their hand in elections if their unscrupulous schemes in the private sector fail? Has the system become so corrupted by greed and factionalism that would-be common thieves see political office as an option to get rich quick?
Although our politicians have not always covered themselves in glory, with many of those who started out with good intentions ending up mired in graft-related scandals, there has always been a distinction between them and common criminals. Has the gap become so narrow that soon we may not see the difference? One shudders with horror just thinking about where we are headed.
But can we really expect much from law enforcement agencies at local level when, evidently, the system is rotten from the very top?
Elsewhere in this edition, we report on Lefu Libetso, a former security guard who says Gwamanda sweet-talked him into investing R21,000 into a get-rich-quick scheme that yielded no positive results. Apparently all Libetso ever received as some kind of a return on his investment were two lunch meetings where he and Gwamanda shared mogodu (tripe) and fried livers.
All of this is coming out now because law enforcement agencies have decided to act. But the truth is that allegations of Gwamanda’s involvement in illegal activities emerged as far back as when his Al Jama-ah party and the ANC announced that he would replace Thapelo Amad as the city’s No 1 citizen.
There are numerous rules governing the election of individuals to public office. These include mandatory screening. It is an indictment of such safeguards that Gwamanda was able to rise to the highest position in the city without anyone in the system flagging his apparently dodgy past in business. There are several institutions that can be blamed for this, not least the city itself, which does thorough background checks when it comes to municipal managers and other city employees but seems impotent when it comes to politicians.
But can we really expect much from law enforcement agencies at local level when, evidently, the system is rotten from the very top?
One troubling story that our colleagues Thanduxolo Jika and Sabelo Skiti have been following for a while involves what seems to be a bitter leadership feud within the police’s crime intelligence department.
Now crime intelligence should be at the centre of the country’s battle against crime. You can have 100 Nhlanhla Mkhwanazis in the police, but if your crime intelligence is not up to scratch, you have already lost the battle — not to mention the war.
Yet, even with our long and painful history of watching crime intelligence being weakened and destroyed during the Richard Mdluli years — and how that undermined the entire policing system — no-one seems to be acting with urgency to defuse this new crisis.
In recent months, as the country was faced with a spate of extortion cases as well as mass murders in the Eastern Cape, the role of crime intelligence came under intense scrutiny from MPs. There seemed to be consensus between them and police minister Senzo Mchunu that urgent action was needed to fix the unit. Several provinces, including the troubled Eastern Cape, have apparently gone for many months without permanent heads of crime intelligence. At the heart of the crisis seems to be a power struggle involving the division’s head, Maj-Gen Dumisani Khumalo, and some of his senior officers.
The power struggle has now taken an ugly turn with at least two of Khumalo’s subordinates — one of them Maj-Gen Feroz Khan — approaching the courts in a bid to stop Khumalo from removing them from their positions.
Serious allegations are made in the court papers, the kind that — if proven — would mean that one of the key law enforcement agencies is directly run by criminals or by surrogates of criminal gangs.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and Mchunu need to attend to this as a matter of urgency. They can ill afford to let the contretemps drag on as long as a similar feud did during the Mdluli years. An immediate investigation is required, otherwise the entire criminal justice system will be as compromised as it was during the worst of the state capture years.
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