South Africa has a long tradition of presidents appointing judicial commissions of inquiry to deal with fraught questions they themselves would prefer not to handle. At their worst, these have been used to cover up wrongdoing and discredit whistleblowers; but at their best, these have catalysed critically needed changes and reforms.

It remains to be seen where on this spectrum the commission of inquiry into allegations of criminality, political interference, and corruption in the criminal justice system – headed by Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga – will ultimately fall. The commission is investigating the allegations made in July 2025 by KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Lt-Gen. Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi relating to the circumstances that led to Police Minister Senzo Mchunu’s abrupt decision, at the end of 2024, to disband the KwaZulu-Natal Political Killings Task Team (PKTT).

The factual thread, as laid out by Mkhwanazi in his witness statement to the commission, is as follows. On 17 April 2024, Armand Swart was fatally shot 23 times as he arrived at his place of work, Q-Tech Engineering, in Vereeniging. Swart was seemingly mistaken for another employee of the company who had blown the whistle on a corrupt Transnet tender. The hitmen were tracked to their safe house in Bramley, Johannesburg, where three suspects – including a serving police officer, Michael Pule Tau – were arrested and their weapons and cellphones seized.

Ballistic analysis subsequently linked these guns to a series of other assassinations and attempted assassinations dating back to 2021. The investigators and prosecutors in charge of the case received repeated death threats and believed that they were up against a larger criminal syndicate that had influential contacts within the South African Police Service (SAPS) in Gauteng.

In November 2024 Lt-Gen. Dumisani Khumalo, the Divisional Commissioner: Crime Intelligence, requested that ten highly skilled members of the PKTT – which he had headed - be seconded to the investigation from KZN, to which Mkhwanazi had agreed.

Death warrant

Mkhwanazi argues that the PKTT signed its own death warrant when the investigative team it was part of conducted dual operations on 6 December 2024. In the first the businessman Takiso “TK” Molefe was arrested for his alleged role in Armand Swart’s murder, and he was subsequently also charged with the killing, in 2022, of Oupa “DJ Sumbody” Sefoka. In the second operation the house of the wealthy and politically connected Gauteng tenderpreneur, Vusimusi “Cat” Matlala, was searched and his devices seized in relation to the failed hit on Matlala’s estranged lover, socialite Tebogo Thobejane, in Sandton in October 2023.

Mkhwanazi further alleges that Matlala conspired with the political fixer Brown Mogotsi to get Police Minister Senzo Mchunu to issue the political directive on 31 December 2024 shutting down the PKTT. The 121 case dockets under investigation by the PKTT were subsequently handed over to the Deputy National Commissioner: Crime Detection Lt Gen. Shadrack Sibiya. The facts and timeline here are clear, and the evidence – which includes WhatsApp messages extracted from Matlala’s cellphone – appears to be compelling, though it is yet to be fully tested.

The far murkier aspect of the scandal relates to the parallel investigation by the Investigative Directorate Against Corruption (IDAC) of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) into both Khumalo and National Police Commissioner, Fannie Masemola. This led to Khumalo’s arrest in June 2025 on separate charges relating to the questionable purchase of two expensive properties by Crime Intelligence – allegedly at inflated prices – as well as the “appointment of an unqualified civilian in a senior post within the SAPS.”

Question

The tricky question here relates less to whether these charges are eventually substantiated or not – they may or may not be – and more to whether such damaging information was first leaked, and then aggressively pursued by IDAC for an ulterior purpose: i.e. whether this was not for the goal of cleaning up Crime Intelligence but rather as a means of getting Khumalo, Masemola (and Mkhwanazi) out of the way.

In his witness statement Mkhwanazi suggests this was the case, citing a WhatsApp exchange on 7 February 2025 between Matlala and an associate. Matlala remarked that the IDAC investigation into this so-called “rogue unit” in the police was “actually good,” as it meant “my person is going to be a National Commissioner now.”

These are the narrow questions that the commission must deal with. There is a broader, thornier, and more deeply rooted problem that the commission needs to grasp. Criminal networks have always been deeply intertwined with the political structures of the liberation movement. In a pattern which goes back to the dawn of democracy whenever state investigative bodies have seriously threatened the interests of those networks, powerful elements within the African National Congress (ANC) have acted to neutralise them.

The NPA was conceived – for a start – as a means of bringing the then politically independent attorneys-general under ANC control and direction. After taking up his position as police commissioner in early 2000 the deeply crooked ANC cadre, Jackie Selebi, immediately set the process in motion to dismantle the expert specialised police units combating armed robbery, police corruption, drug smuggling and so on.

Rogue

When investigative units in the Scorpions, SARS, and Hawks then went “rogue” and started poking their noses into politically sensitive cases – which they were certainly not meant to do – they too were shuttered or sidelined by powerful interests in the ANC. In almost all these cases dirt was dug up (or made up) and then leaked to the media to provide a pretext for such actions. The perfect has long been weaponised against the good. The closure of the PKTT – at least on Mkhwanazi’s version – thus fits into a depressingly familiar pattern.

Over the years the closure of any investigative unit which threatened politically influential criminal elements has devastated the ability of the South African state to combat organised crime. It has nurtured the belief among such criminals that they could act with total impunity. Clearly, the hitmen who murdered Armand Swart had seen no need to take such elementary but bothersome precautions as disposing of their weapons after each prior assassination.

Indeed, the genuinely surprising aspect of the whole affair, from a South African point of view, is that the hitmen were arrested in the first place, that those who allegedly ordered the hits were then identified and charged, and that political efforts to shut down the PKTT have been fought so aggressively thus far.

The true measure of the Madlanga commission will lie in its impact: will we see a reversion to the status quo, where politically shielded hitmen operate undisturbed for years across Gauteng? Or will it serve as a catalyst for change – with investigators and prosecutors empowered to finally set about dismantling the powerful political-criminal syndicates that have run the province (and country) into the ground.

James Myburgh is Director of Bremen Democratic Research (BRE-DE-RE), an initiative to identify and counter threats to the liberty, comity and prosperity of democratic societies through historical and comparative research.