Saps is at war with itself

KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi and Crime Intelligence head Lieutenant-General Dumisani Khumalo were nearly arrested last week by the National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) Independent Directorate Against Corruption (Idac).

Although Mkhwanazi was never asked to present himself to the Brooklyn Police Station in Pretoria like Khumalo was, he accompanied Khumalo to observe the expected arrest.

The official who asked Khumalo to present himself for arrest never turned up and the arrest was never made, leaving Mkhwanazi to declare that there is a war going on within the South African Police Service (Saps).

Mkhwanazi does not need to tell anyone that because the whole nation knows it’s an open secret that Saps has been at war with itself for far too many years, as witnessed by the revelations before the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry.

It would be silly of any commentator to suggest that only a final report by the Madlanga commission can pronounce on the war within Saps, when top police leadership has been shown to be in cahoots with criminals.

For police leadership to be clearly corrupt and compromised like that, other top police officials and the NPA must be turning a blind eye to it all.

In fact, they would not only have to look the other way, but would need to place hurdles in the path of anyone seeking to end the rot.

One person who has risked it all and gone on record to fight corruption in the Saps is Mkhwanazi.

In the war between good and bad in the Saps, he put his hand up to point out that he was for good in front of the whole nation on 6 July last year, at that now historic press conference that led to the establishment of the Madlanga commission.

That move alone placed a bull’s eye on Mkhwanazi’s forehead. But also, in a way, served to protect him because the bad guys cannot afford the heat that would come from publicly taking down the one man who has pointed to their existence.

And they devised other ways to take him down.

When the Madlanga commission was established, it seemed a foregone conclusion that it would go the same way other commissions had gone in the history of this country: to oblivion.

Even the more expensive and much touted Zondo commission did not achieve even a 10th of results of the Madlanga commission, which has been sitting for only nine months.

Criminals and crooked police officers are running for cover. But not without fighting back.

The success of the Madlanga commission has relied mostly on the immediacy and quality of the investigations that the team behind the scenes is doing.

It is a common quip that “you make your last appearance before the commission on Friday and are applying for bail on Monday”. That sums up the success of this commission so far.

It is because the good guys in the police service are doing an excellent job in presenting the cases to the NPA for prosecution without undue delay.

What better way would the bad guys have to disrupt the work of the Madlanga commission than to go to the heart of the good guys and arrest those digging into the affairs of the bad guys?

For the duration of the commission, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his Cabinet should make it such that all evidence of wrongdoing against any top police official be put before the public scrutiny of the commission, so that the public knows Idac is not batting for the bad guys.