The Saps rebuttal to claims of a compromised ballistic service is that the problem is workload, not sabotage.
Lady Justice is neither blind, nor even-handed. She presides over a cynical system of judicial triage in which homicide investigations are pursued according to the political needs of the ANC.
If the victim is not a social celebrity or politically connected, the case is quietly downgraded in terms of the attention it will receive from SA Police Service (Saps).
More sinisterly, if conscientious detectives tug at threads that lead to the criminal syndicates that are embedded in the police and the ANC elite, the investigation is actively sabotaged.
Madlanga commission’s testimonies
The Madlanga commission, as well as the parliamentary ad hoc committee, have, over the past six weeks, heard damning testimony of how politicians, police officers and major criminals happily inhabit the same ecosystem.
It’s a tangled skein, but following any single thread – in recent days, the testimony relating to a hit on a Vereeniging engineer last year – maps another set of contours to SAPS’ collapse and criminal capture.
In April last year, Armand Swart was gunned down outside his Vereeniging place of work, taking 23 bullets to the body, after he was apparently mistakenly identified as a whistle-blower exposing Transnet corruption.
Arrests in the Swart case
Three suspects – two of them police officers – were arrested within hours and multiple firearms and cartridges were seized.
An investigator, who testified anonymously for fear of assassination, told the commission the delays were sabotage. When a second lab re-examined the exhibits to minimise interference, the firearms from Swart’s killing were tied not only to the Swart hit, but to roughly 27 other shootings, including at least 20 murders.
The Saps rebuttal to claims of a compromised ballistic service is that the problem is workload, not sabotage.
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Money spent on VIP protection
But there are some warped values at play. Saps, in the financial year, will spend R2.2 billion on VIP protection. Yet the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) that suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu axed for being too expensive, was costing a mere R70 million a year.
The vast amounts lavished on cocooning politicians, versus the grudging trickle for real police work, are emblematic of an ANC government rotten to the core. The Madlanga commission itself, as conceived by President Cyril Ramaphosa, was intended as a form of VIP protection.
The commission was a device to deflect and distract to shield Mchunu, Ramaphosa’s successor of choice. It’s a strategy that is backfiring. Ramaphosa hasn’t yet been called to testify before either the commission or the committee. Given what has emerged, his absence is hard to fathom.
Ramaphosa’s fingerprints are all over the personnel choices and the culture that produced this Saps mess. Start with Bheki Cele, fired by former president Jacob Zuma for dishonesty and then resurrected by Ramaphosa.
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Mchunu’s hand
Then there’s Mchunu. MPs across the spectrum have complained about his evasive answers and shape-shifting accounts.
Ramaphosa created the Madlanga commission so as to contain and cauterise the links between ANC leaders and Saps top brass with the gangster syndicates.
Instead, each day of testimony widens the ring of toxic disclosures, with the potential to sully Ramaphosa’s legacy as surely as state looting did Zuma’s.
As fatal to Ramaphosa’s hope of controlling the narrative has been the ad hoc committee. Parliament’s uncharacteristic assertiveness in running a parallel inquiry has made a cover-up impossible.
Dual-track appearances – one operating with judicial circumspection, the other with a cut-throat instinct for the jugular from MPs who are bitter foes of the ANC – tend to quickly expose the spin and lies.
Lady Justice has to shake off her torpor: name those implicated; expose the triage; and force consequences, no matter what the political consequences. It’s an opportunity that probably will go begging.
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