Addressing a nation stunned by revelations that the criminal justice system, primarily the police and the intelligence services, has been infiltrated by sophisticated criminal syndicates, President Cyril Ramaphosa last July appointed the Madlanga commission to investigate these troubling allegations, urging the esteemed justice to submit an interim report in three months.
On December 17 last year, Madlanga duly delivered. Since then, it’s been quiet on the presidential front, the reason for which we can only speculate.
Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, KwaZulu-Natal provincial police commissioner, had dramatically marched into a press conference in Durban dressed in military fatigues, escorted by similarly attired underlings carrying high-calibre weapons, and dropped the bombshell, naming names and accusing police minister Senzo Mchunu of being in cahoots with the criminal underworld. Astounding as Mkhwanazi’s disclosures were, the allegations seemed eerily believable for a country that has lived with violent crime and the police’s baffling inability to curb it. They made sense. The penny dropped.
A week later, in a televised address, Ramaphosa promised to act with speed in dealing with the allegations which, he said, “if proven true, threaten to undermine the confidence of South Africans in the ability of the South African Police Service to protect them and to effectively fight crime and corruption”.
Mchunu was suspended with immediate effect, with Firoz Cachalia appointed as acting police minister. Madlanga would submit an interim report within three months, the president said.
Since the commission complied and submitted its interim report more than a month ago, there has been no word from Ramaphosa’s office. It’s been dead silence, apart from the announcement that — in keeping with the secretive nature of his presidency — the report would not be released to the public.
“It is critical that these matters be attended to with the necessary urgency and thoroughness.” Those were his words. But since the commission complied and submitted its interim report more than a month ago, there has been no word from Ramaphosa’s office. It’s been dead silence, apart from the announcement that — in keeping with the secretive nature of his presidency — the report would not be released to the public. It makes one wonder what all the fuss has been about. Why demand an urgent interim report if the intention was to do nothing about it? Was it for his own amusement or to decorate his in-tray?
When Mkhwanazi made the allegations, the public, already exasperated by crime and corruption, demanded that heads should roll immediately. But Ramaphosa defied the public outcry and acted with caution instead. He suspended Mchunu, ignoring demands that he be put out to grass. The entire police top brass, who’d either ignored or presided over this debacle, were left intact, except for Shadrack Sibiya, the deputy national police commissioner, who seemed to have borne the brunt of Mkhwanazi’s criticism. He’s kicking his heels at home.
But,of course, we’ve been here before. Ramaphosa’s predilection to appoint commissions of inquiry for every problem he encounters, and then do nothing about their findings, has come to define his presidency. Commissions of inquiry, it would seem, are not intended to clarify and help him solve the problem, but to buy himself time and then do nothing about it.
The evidence is overwhelming. His term of office is littered with commissions and task teams that were announced with great fanfare and at great cost to the taxpayer, only for their recommendations to be put aside and forgotten the moment they landed on the president’s desk. The judicial commission of inquiry into allegations of state capture chaired by former chief justice Raymond Zondo sat for almost four years at a cost of more than a billion rands. Despite assurances by Ramaphosa that he was serious about implementing its recommendations, all six volumes of Zondo’s report are apparently gathering dust in one of the presidential vaults. He doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to do anything about it.
Sceptics could hear the sound of the can being kicked down the road
And so, when the Madlanga commission was appointed to investigate the alleged collusion of the police with criminal elements, sceptics could hear the sound of the can being kicked down the road. It was classic Ramaphosa: when in a fix, or scared to make a tough decision, simply appoint a commission. It takes the steam — and the stink — out of the issue. The hope is that the public will have moved on by the time the commission presents its findings.
The Zondo commission provides a salient example of this inaction or procrastination and, unfortunately, casts a long shadow over the Madlanga commission. People point to Zondo, with some justification, to argue that Madlanga will be a nonstarter. By sitting on the report and refusing to release its contents to the public, Ramaphosa is fuelling such scepticism.
The public has a right to know what’s in the report — they are the main stakeholders — even if Ramaphosa has no intention of doing anything about it. Only dictatorships hide things away from the public eye.
One would have thought that, given the gravity of the issues aired at the commission, Ramaphosa would have instantly been roused from his usual insouciance, and taken the matter seriously. We live in hope.
But nobody will have been left unmoved by the testimony, especially of the police officers testifying incognito whose lives have been turned into hell, hunted like animals by the very criminals they’re investigating and wary of sharing their findings with their superiors, who they know are colluding with the criminals. And, one suspects, the clown show that is the Ekurhuleni municipality is by no means an exception.
But if all these revelations didn’t jolt the president into action, the killing of Marius van der Merwe — who testified as Witness D — in front of his wife and children surely should have. What we’re dealing with here is literally a matter of life and death, and the president seems cheerfully indifferent. The crooks and those within the state who are abetting them are fearlessly and arrogantly strutting the streets. The more Ramaphosa dawdles, the more they’ll get emboldened.
He must not only let the public see the report; he must urgently act on it.
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