The Minister shut down the only successful task team — Mkhwanazi

Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi said that suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu’s disbandment of the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) was a red flag because it was the only one of the 11 that was successful.

He said this during his appearance as a witness before the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry on 17 September. Mkhwanazi, who is the KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner, was the first witness to appear.

The General was responding to a question by the Commission’s chair, former Deputy Chief Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga, asking him about Mchunu’s decision to disband the PKTT in December 2024.

“Let me ask this direct question, General: Is this a policy or policing issue, and why?” Madlanga asked.

Mkhwanazi said that given his experience, the letter was an operational one, “not policy. It talks to the operational work of the South African Police Service.”

“The PTKK is the one team that has been successful out of 11 task teams that are running at the national level. But it is the only team that receives this type of letter,” Mkhwanazi told the Commission.

This came following the reading of then-Police Minister Mchunu’s letter, which, among other things, ordered the disbandment of the PKTT and provided his justification for doing so.

“The mandate was to stop, investigate, and resolve unresolved murders of politicians in the country, especially in KZN,” the letter from Mchunu read.

“My observation is 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 be deestablished immediately.”

The KZN Police Commissioner strongly disagreed with Mchunu, saying that PKTT had an “unmatched success rate” and had seen significant success in its detection and conviction rates.

He said that statistics to support this claim can be provided to the Commission.

The PKTT, launched in July 2018 as an ad-hoc interdisciplinary unit within the SAPS tasked with investigating political killings, initially only operated within the bounds of KZN.

Roughly a year later, the unit was assigned dedicated prosecutors, making it a multi-disciplinary prosecutorial-guided task team.

Over time, Mkhwanazi says the unit’s success saw it expand operations to the Eastern Cape and assist the Gauteng Organised Crime Unit with one of its investigations into the criminal underworld.

Broadly, the PKTT was established to try and address the scourge of political killings in the country.

According to a report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, political assassinations and spikes in violence in local election years. Spikes particularly occurred in 2016 (27 cases) and 2021 (30 cases).

“These spikes are the result of the fierce competition for local government positions and access to municipal finances, which often comes to a head during municipal elections as changes in control are anticipated and sometimes averted through hits.”

How we got here

On 6 July this year, Mkhwanazi broke ranks and held a press conference where he made allegations that a criminal syndicate had captured the country’s law enforcement and intelligence structures.

These allegations also implicated Mchunu in interfering with sensitive police investigations and colluding with businesspeople to disband the PKTT.

As a result, President Cyril Ramaphosa established the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry to investigate the veracity, scope, and impact of Mkhwanazi’s allegations.

“These allegations, 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 fight crime and corruption effectively,” Ramaphosa said in an address.

However, this was not the first time the KZN Police Commissioner attempted to bring his suspicions of political interference and criminal infiltration in SAPS and the criminal justice system to the public’s attention.

Mkhwanazi first attempted to do so when he appeared on an Eyewitness News interview in late January, just under a month after reading Mchunu’s letter.

He also noted in his statement that he reached out to Mchunu himself and several people Mchunu might listen to to try and arrange a meeting with the then-minister about the letter, but had no success.

Mkhwanazi said that he also contacted Ian Cameron, the chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police, which resulted in his appearing before the committee. However, he says nothing came of his concerns.