DURBAN - KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner, Lt-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, has set off panic alarms across the country over damning allegations of corruption and interference within the SAPS.
The pieces of the police puzzle are now coming together.
READ: Three parly committees to probe Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi's claims
Mkhwanazi has taken aim at allegedly corrupt politicians, police, and prosecutors in a tell-all press conference.
He said, "This investigation has unmasked the syndicate which involves politicians, law enforcement, SAPS, Metro Police and Correctional Services, prosecutors, judiciary and is controlled by a drug cartel as well as business people.”
The players he believes are part of the problem include Police Minister Senzo Mchunu.
Mchunu is accused of interfering in police matters and benefiting from the criminal underworld.
In March this year, he told a police portfolio committee meeting he didn’t know Brown Mogotsi – a person claiming to be close to him. Then, in a post on TikTok, a different version emerged.
Mchunu said, "The person he speaks of is a comrade from the North West, who doesn't even work for the department, is not my close associate, as he was saying there."
"If I'm understating the name, this is just someone who usually calls with regards to matters of the ANC, not things of the department. He WhatsApps if there is something of the department that he has come across, whether it may be good things or bad things you see, like how comrades would do so. I get those things every day from people that I know and people that I don't know."
"So now if you say close association, you imply that it's someone that I smoke cigarettes with; someone who is a buddy, which is not the case at all. This year, now it's March, I think the last I saw him was last year and that too was by his request to discuss something about the ANC.”
Mkhwanazi also accused Shadrack Sibiya, the deputy national commissioner of crime detection, of being a criminal doing the minister’s bidding.
Another key player identified by Mkhwanazi is Vusimuzi Matlala, a businessman accused of attempted murder.
READ: Masemola says he didn't close political killings task team
News24 investigative journalist Jeff Wicks summarised, "Vusimuzi Matlala is an enigmatic fellow, but someone who we've been following for a long time now."
"He first appeared on our radar in 2022 when we were investigating the Tembisa Hospital scandal, which was exposed by Babita Deokaran."
"She had actually flagged three shell companies, which he controlled, which were billing the hospital. And through our investigation, we placed that as part of a larger syndicate and in totality, part of the R2.3 billion extraction syndicate that's under investigation by the SIU and the Hawks."
"And while he was under investigation by both the SIU and the Hawks for procurement fraud or alleged procurement fraud, he scores a tender from the SAPs for R360-million in June last year.”
Dumisani Khumalo, the now corruption-accused crime intelligence head, who also leads the political killings task team is a key figure in the saga.
Wicks said, "Katiso (KT) Molefe is also a significant figure. He's on bail now. But he's accused of masterminding Transnet tender fraud and then eliminating a whistleblower. And it was both these cases, the Matlala case and the Molefe case, that seemed to have landed the political killings task team in hot water, if we are to believe the general."
In April last year, Armand Swart, an employee at a Transnet service provider, was murdered in Vereeniging.
Three suspects, including a policeman, were arrested. Guns and cellphones were confiscated.
Then, Gauteng police, who had started dismantling a criminal syndicate, quickly realised they were working against their own.
They requested help from Mkhwanazi, who deployed ten members of the Political Killings Task Team.
Mhkwanazi's version of events starts on 6 December 2024 when the political killings task team arrested businessman Katiso Molefe for the murder of engineer Armand Swart and spans six months until June 2025.
Wicks commented on the impact of his allegations, saying, "The net effect of this is that it destabilises the entire police force. I mean, we've got the president flying back from Brazil to deal with this matter because, as he rightly says, this is a grave security concern, and it speaks to the factional and fractured nature of the police. And the net result of that is rampant crime, which we all complain about.”
Both Sibiya and Mchunu have publicly rejected the allegations made against them.
The national police commissioner, General Fannie Masemola, is expected to address some of these issues this week.