If KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi says political killings are racking the province, then it pays to listen.
The trauma of the uDlame, the 1985-1996 civil war that left 12,000 people dead and thousands more injured or displaced, still lingers in these eternal hills. There was violence before. There has been an extraordinary amount of violence since, including the assassination of ANC councillor Thembinkosi Lombo near Greytown in 2022.
So the general’s July 6 press briefing, in which he claimed that South Africa’s criminal justice system has been infiltrated by criminal syndicates whose tendrils allegedly reach into the police, judiciary and intelligence, and perhaps even all the way into parliament itself, should not come as a surprise, given what has gone before.
Sclerotic politics. State capture. Ancient feuds. Broederbond konneksies. Too-tall locomotives. Death squads. Taxi violence. SADF troops giving opfoks to civilians and later SANDF troops too during the Covid lockdown. Hopelessness and joblessness. Raw sewage in the streets of Emfuleni. Rogue army officers in the 1980s fattening their wallets on poached ivory from Angola. Murder. Municipal corruption. Tenderpreneurs. Witdoeke killing a baby in Boipatong. Ministerial junkets to New York. Simmering anger at the elites whose promises are as empty as Joburg’s reservoirs. This page is not long enough.
South Africans can be forgiven for being numb to yet another commission of inquiry, for there have been so many and yet so few have ended in justice being served.
All eyes, then, on Mkhwanazi as he gives evidence to the Madlanga Commission, as well as those whom he has accused. As retired deputy chief justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga himself says, a “healthy” criminal justice system “is key to the rule of law and in turn, to a functioning constitutional democracy”.
Perhaps the Madlanga Commission will break with tradition and perhaps those findings will shine a spotlight deep into the murk. Not despair, then — at least not yet — but hope.
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