Robert McBride still believes corruption in the police is the single biggest threat to national security in South Africa.
He first made the comment seven years ago before parliament’s police committee, when he was head of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid). He shocked MPs with a vivid description of how senior police officers sought to neutralise the watchdog institution.
Nothing has changed, he says in an interview with the FM, except that corruption in the police has become decidedly more brazen — and Ipid is nowhere to be seen.
The dramatic media briefing on July 6 at which KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi accused police minister Senzo Mchunu, deputy police commissioner Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya, prosecutors and magistrates of colluding with criminal cartels has reverberated through the criminal justice system.
President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed a judicial commission of inquiry led by former Constitutional Court justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga and MPs set up an ad hoc committee to investigate.
Testimony before the Madlanga commission over the past two weeks has included in camera testimony from Gauteng detectives — who are now in hiding — alleging corruption on the part of at least three police generals. The allegations raise awkward questions about the role of Ipid — all it has had to say in public about Mkhwanazi was a statement in March that it was investigating him for “allegedly interfering” with the arrest of a prisons official in 2023. Ipid initially said this was based on a complaint from Mchunu, but later backtracked, saying it was from an anonymous source.
I might get called by either of the inquiries and I’ll look forward to it. I wish it would happen. I can articulate problems more openly and more intensively and in a more in-depth way, under oath
— Robert McBride
McBride is hesitant to comment on Ipid’s involvement (or lack thereof) in the current scandals. His name has emerged before parliament’s ad hoc committee, in the context of a meeting he had with Mchunu during Mchunu’s stint as KZN premier between 2013 and 2016. McBride was accompanied by Cedrick Nkabinde, who was an Ipid investigator at the time and is now the minister’s chief of staff. Nkabinde was involved in Mchunu’s attempts to disband the KZN political killings task team.
“I might get called by either of the inquiries and I’ll look forward to it. I wish it would happen. I can articulate problems more openly and more intensively and in a more in-depth way, under oath,” says McBride.
However, he does think “there’s a general feeling that Ipid’s effectiveness has been dismantled and its independence compromised, and that there’s undue interference in Ipid operations. And from my understanding, evidence I’ve seen, there is compromise at the behest of ministers as to what happens in Ipid.”
McBride left Ipid in 2019 when Mchunu’s predecessor as minister, Bheki Cele, failed to renew his contract. After a court battle — which McBride won — parliament’s police portfolio committee sided with Cele’s view that McBride should step down. He later joined the State Security Agency on a contract basis.
On the general issue of corruption in the police, which he touched on in parliament in 2018, McBride says the situation has deteriorated since then. Despite evidence at the Zondo commission on the extent of corruption, political interference and capture of the police, nothing has been done.
McBride says the type of corruption being described at the Madlanga commission and before the parliamentary committee occurs in police forces around the world. But what sets South Africa apart is the lack of accountability.
“It’s just that [in the West] there is oversight and oversight is taken seriously, and accountability is taken seriously. In Europe and North America, they’ve experienced this type of corruption, but not on the blatant scale that we have. Ours is because there haven’t been any consequences and people have not actually been held to account.”
Lifestyle audits are a good starting point in the campaign against corruption in the police. The Special Investigating Unit has confirmed to the FM that it is finalising an agreement with national police commissioner Gen Fannie Masemola to conduct these into the top brass.
But the police service needs a thorough structural and institutional overhaul from top to bottom, McBride says.
“You have got to keep the waters clean. The contamination starts in college,” he says.
“So the issue is how you keep them clean from college, through the system, how you ground them. And what type of human being you recruit. It’s not an employment agency. You’ve got to test certain things, whether the person has the right temperament.”
In too many cases, McBride says, recruits are accepted as “a favour, then they are owned from the start”.
“At the other end, get rid of dead wood and rationalise this proliferation of generals. It’s too much. It’s cumbersome.”
Testimony at the two inquiries now under way has been dramatic. At the parliamentary hearing this week Cele effectively threw Mchunu under the bus, contradicting an earlier assertion by the minister that he had never, “not once”, met alleged cartel boss Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala.
But Cele told the committee that Matlala, now in detention on charges of attempted murder, had told him that he and Mchunu had discussed funding for the minister’s presidential ambitions. Not only was doubt cast over Mchunu’s credibility, but the turmoil in the police was linked to the ANC’s succession race.
In the end, the inquiries must result in reform of the police, Ipid and other oversight bodies; otherwise South Africa will descend further into mafia state terrain.
