It is now almost a forgotten piece of history, but one of the last straws to break the proverbial camel’s back in the relationship between then president Jacob Zuma and the ANC’s inner circle was a revelation that he planned to appoint a political novice with no policing experience as the country’s top cop.
It was August 2017 and the ANC’s elective national conference was looming. Though Zuma would not be standing — as he was at the tail end of his second and last term — he was heavily invested in the outcome, with one of the slates enjoying his enthusiastic support.
Up to that point, the majority of the party’s influential national working committee, as well as the top six, seemed firmly behind Zuma despite the controversy swirling around him over state capture and corruption.
But as Women’s Day approached, news spread that he wanted one Leanne Williams as the new national police commissioner, and the announcement of her appointment would be the highlight of that year’s commemoration of the historic 1956 Women’s March on the Union Buildings.
The little that was known of Williams was that she had academic qualifications in banking and financial management and that, a year earlier, she had unsuccessfully stood as a mayoral candidate for Johannesburg on the ticket of Gayton McKenzie and Kenny Kunene’s Patriotic Alliance.
Her proximity to the two ex-convicts turned politicians added to the unease about Zuma’s intended appointment, with some in the ANC leadership suggesting that the speed with which the process was moving posed a potential security threat.
In the end the pushback succeeded and Williams was never appointed. But politically the damage had been done for the then president, with some of his erstwhile associates privately accusing him of being influenced by individuals outside of the state in making such a key appointment.
Reporting on the saga some months later, this newspaper quoted a cabinet minister as saying: “We had just saved him [Zuma] from a motion of no confidence in parliament and then he wanted to appoint this woman. That was not only going to affect him but embarrass the ANC.”
The message seemed to be clear. Though his comrades were prepared to watch in silence as he gave the keys to the Guptas to do as they wished with parastatals and some government departments, they drew a line in the sand when it came to the running of the police service. They could not afford the country’s security services falling into the wrong hands.
Yet, seven years after Zuma’s removal from office, allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi suggest that is exactly what has happened.
The judicial commission of inquiry, headed by recently retired Constitutional Court judge Mbuyiseli Madlanga, is yet to tell fact from fiction in the several versions of what has been happening in the police service by Mkhwanazi and those he chiefly accused — suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu and national deputy police commissioner Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya.
But already a couple of developments and accepted facts strongly suggest that top politicians and high-ranking police officials have had relationships with outsiders that had the potential to compromise the integrity of police work.
Why the head of the Hawks sees fit to remain in contact with a person facing such serious criminal charges remains a puzzle. Even if Malcolm X did provide valuable information, as Lebeya claims, why should the point of first contact be with him — the head of the institution — and not the officers at the coalface of investigations?
Mchunu and Sibiya, for instance, should have to explain to the commission how the minister’s controversial and unpublicised decision to disband the political killings task team became the subject of a WhatsApp conversation between a civilian familiar to the minister, Oupa Brown Mogotsi, and a murder suspect, Vusumuzi “Cat” Matlala.
Recently retired Hawks boss Lt-Gen Godfrey Lebeya should have to explain why he sent a couple of his officers to the Sandton home of businessman Katiso Molefe when he was being arrested by another group of policemen for the murder of Vaal engineer Armand Swart. This incident is particularly troubling as it could have easily ended in tragedy, with law enforcement officers shooting at each other.
Mkhwanazi, based on his remarks at the now famous press conference a few Sundays ago, clearly believes that the Hawks officers were sent to the house to intimidate the other cops from effecting the arrest.
Lebeya has told the media that he sent the Hawks to the house after receiving a call from an informant. The informant, it has since turned out, is one Malcolm X — a highly connected and controversial “fixer” who describes himself as a “super consultant”. Lebeya insists he had to give the instruction because an informant who had given credible information in the past said the cops at the scene claimed to have been sent by Lebeya himself. Malcolm X denies moonlighting as a Hawks informant.
What makes matters worse is that Malcolm X is currently on trial for a 2023 case in which he and three policemen — Desmond Kekana, James Sekhaolela and Raymond Mokaile — are said to have tried to extort millions of rands from a wealthy Zambian businessman. They apparently threatened to arrest the businessman’s partner and son for violating the country’s immigration regulations.
Why the head of the Hawks sees fit to remain in contact with a person facing such serious criminal charges remains a puzzle. Even if Malcolm X did provide valuable information, as Lebeya claims, why should the point of first contact be with him — the head of the institution — and not the officers at the coalface of investigations?
This problem of top police managers and political appointees wanting to play spy bosses by running their own informal networks of covert information gathering opens them up to possible manipulation and capture by the very “assets” they think they are running.
One would have thought police bosses and ministers would have learnt this important lesson from the saga of convicted drug kingpin Glenn Agliotti, which landed the late national police commissioner Jackie Selebi in prison. But alas.
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