On New Year’s Day, Lt-Gen Dumisani Khumalo received calls “from more than 110 people” who worked under him, asking him to explain, after police minister Senzo Mchunu’s directive disbanding the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) began circulating on social media.
He could not answer, he told the Madlanga Commission on Wednesday. Khumalo was the task team’s leader, but he had not been consulted or informed by the minister ahead of the decision, he said.
“It was indeed not the happiest New Year’s Day for me,” the Crime Intelligence boss said.
The directive was contained in a letter to the national police commissioner dated December 31 2024. It said the minister’s observation was that ”further existence of this team is no longer required, nor is it adding any value to policing in South Africa. I therefore direct that the Political Killings Task Team be disestablished immediately.”
Khumalo said that, normally, his subordinates would expect any communication affecting them to come from him or his office. “But this time around, the letter just started to trend.”
The language used in the letter was also worrying to his staff — “to say how can we sacrifice and leave our families for six to seven years; and then we are told we are value-less.”
I had never been given the opportunity to brief the ministry, and I have never received any complaints or signs of unhappiness. I was never consulted when the letter was drafted and finalised.
— Lt-Gen Dumisani Khumalo
Khumalo said he had read the letter over 50 times, trying to make sense of it. “But one is failing to understand each and every paragraph,” said Khumalo, adding that the only person who could understand it is the writer.
“I had never been given the opportunity to brief the ministry, and I have never received any complaints or signs of unhappiness. I was never consulted when the letter was drafted and finalised. It came as a surprise even to myself,” he said.
Evidence leader Adila Hassim SC asked whether Khumalo did not find it “strange that on something so important … what the minister says is so terse, or so brief, and without much substantiation”.
He found it “very strange”, he replied.
He said his assessment of the latter was that the disbandment had to be “fast-tracked” and the minister did not have a strategic view of the issues he raised because these would have had to have been informed by a briefing, which should have been received prior to the crafting of the letter.
Hassim then took Khumalo through the declassified minutes of the inter-ministerial committee that had mandated the establishment of the task team.
The minutes reflected that the committee was satisfied with the work of the task team and had approved when it recruited more members and took on “parallel investigations” of cases that were not about political killings but were potentially connected, either through the same suspects or the use of the same weapons.
In the last set of minutes of a meeting in September 2023, the inter-ministerial committee resolved that “the task team cannot be dissolved, it must continue”.
Khumalo accused Mchunu of acting in bad faith when he took the disbandment decision. He referred to a later letter he received from deputy national commissioner Shadrack Sibiya in January, which instructed Khumalo to make a report, including an analysis of the PKTT’s effectiveness.
Khumalo said “if the decision to disband was taken in good faith the minister would presumably have already done this analysis prior to taking the disbandment decision”.
If the minister did not have any analysis of the PKTT’s effectiveness at the time of his decision to disband, “he could not have, in good faith, reached the conclusion that the PKTT is no longer required and adds no value to policing in South Africa,” said Khumalo.
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