Don’t be fooled or lulled into complacency by the attention that is being lavished on the current corruption scandal in the South African Police Service. Don’t tell yourself: “We have a crisis in the police but that is being handled, so all is OK.”
It’s not OK. What Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi revealed about the ways corrupt tenderpreneurs pay and control politicians to push their interests and make their criminal activities disappear is just the tip of the iceberg. The rot goes well beyond the police ministry. Similar or worse corruption can be found at the South African National Defence Force. It is also in the South African Navy. It stretches further into the Air Force. It is rampant at the State Security Agency (SSA).
In fact, with its opaque slush funds, poor leadership and zero accountability, the SSA (and the SAPS Crime Intelligence provincial and national divisions) is more a criminal gang than a state entity. With billions of rand poured into it every year, the SSA still could not anticipate the July 2021 riots. This time it did not warn President Cyril Ramaphosa that his police minister Senzo Mchunu, is close to a man, Brown Mogotsi, who was passing on classified information to an attempted murder accused and suspected criminal, Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala.
We all know about the criminal networks that had infiltrated and nearly collapsed Eskom. Again, don’t be fooled or lulled. Many other state-owned enterprises are wracked by similar or worse corruption. And all of it, sad to say, ends up at the door of the ANC and its leaders. If one considers the recent charges laid against two former Transnet group CEOs, for example, the whole sorry saga ends up at the door of the Gupta family — benefactors of former president Jacob Zuma, his wives and children.
It is thus no surprise at all to now discover that Mchunu’s political machinations were being funded by Matlala, a man implicated in attempted murder and corruption.
What I am saying is: this is the ANC. This is its modus operandi. This is how the Covid-19 corruption happened, for example. If you follow the money trail of the R431m spent by the Gauteng department of education on ‘sanitising’ schools (something not required or recommended by either the department of health or the department of basic education) in 2020, you will find relatives and friends of politicians at the end. Most government corruption starts and ends with a politician who uses their power and access to facilitate the deal.
If one considers just what impact the failure to deal with corruption has done to South Africa, one wants to weep.
We need more Mkhwanazis everywhere, because the kind of corruption that he bust open last week is everywhere. It needs whistle-blowers and, crucially, it needs crime fighters.
In February defence minister Angie Motshekga told parliament that the military veterans unit within her department is a wrecked and sinking ship.
“We have cases left, right and centre of millionaires who are military veterans. They stay in the city, yet they take the department to court because they are receiving benefits that should not apply to them — like paying R20,000 for school fees for children who don’t even attend the schools we are supposed to be covering,” she said.
Last week DA MP Nicholas Gotsell claimed that Motshekga’s department of defence cannot account for R2.1bn from Treasury and that troops who had served in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were still not paid despite R813m being allocated for their allowances. This sort of thing seems to have become par for the course in the SANDF for the past 30 years.
If one considers just what impact the failure to deal with corruption has done to South Africa, one wants to weep. Investors have walked away from us because we are seen as violent (our murder rates are some of the highest in the world) and robberies at business premises are sky-high. Talented individuals who could take up jobs here have opted for other countries because they are scared off by crime.
Finding out that these crimes are not being solved because the police minister is shutting down pivotal units such as the political killings task team in KwaZulu-Natal to protect his financial benefactors is a gut punch for South Africans.
We should not lie to ourselves, though. We know the problem and we know how to solve it. The ANC, from municipal level to the national executive committee, knows that it is its own people who have trashed our infrastructure and our own institutions. If it was not the ANC that was responsible then the party would be turning on Ramaphosa for his failure to fire ministers who have consistently been implicated in corruption.
The ANC is the architect and implementer of all this corruption. It thrives on it. It has become the corruption itself. Don’t be fooled by the flurry of actions on the Mkhwanazi allegations. The whole system is rotten, and the whole system needs to be torn down and overhauled.
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