Why was disgraced police minister Senzo Mchunu placed on leave and not, as they put it in the ANC, “relieved of his duties”?
South Africa deserves an answer to this question. It makes no sense that a man who has lied to parliament at least once about his dodgy associates, and who summarily shut down a police task team, is still drawing a minister’s salary and undermining trust in the criminal justice system.
South Africa faces a grave situation because of the Mchunu scandal. Over the past two weeks inflammatory posts threatening a repeat of the July 2021 riots have appeared on social media. President Cyril Ramaphosa has apparently been briefed by the State Security Agency on the heightened threat of unrest. Within hours of his televised address on Sunday, the top trending topic on X was #NationalShutdown — calls to bring the country to a halt.
While the police minister is on leave, the national police commissioner is not in charge of the country’s most volatile province, KwaZulu-Natal. The national crime intelligence division is led by a man accused by his colleague in KZN of being a “criminal”. The KZN provincial police commissioner is accused of making threats and behaving like a “warlord”.
All this screams “major risk” in a country that is one burning truck away from the next July 2021. That should be avoided. At the same time, however, leaders cannot fail to act decisively and with moral clarity simply because they want to avoid conflict.
So why didn’t Ramaphosa send a strong, clear message by firing Mchunu? When he put his ally on leave, Ramaphosa may have been thinking of his comrade, former president Thabo Mbeki. He may have been thinking back to June 14 2005 when Mbeki called a special joint sitting of the two houses of parliament. What he announced on that occasion still roils South Africa today.
Two weeks before the sitting, Schabir Shaik had been found guilty of bribing Mbeki’s deputy, Jacob Zuma. If Mbeki had not acted against his long-time comrade, he would have been seen as a leader who tolerated corruption. But punishing the powerful KZN politician risked provoking a revolt by those within the party who railed against his fidelity to high ethical standards and who saw the judiciary and even the concept of the rule of law as an oppressive “white man’s law”. Mbeki fired Zuma anyway.
Mbeki did the right thing, but it came with a cost. A ‘coalition of the disgruntled’ in the ANC got rid of him
Mbeki did the right thing, but it came with a cost. A “coalition of the disgruntled” in the ANC got rid of him, installed Zuma as president and then looted the country. When he was finally sent to jail in 2021 over his refusal to co-operate with the Zondo commission, Zuma supporters ignited the riots in which 354 people died.
Zuma’s return to power was engineered at the ANC’s 2005 national general conference, the party’s conference to assess progress after elections.
The ANC goes to its next national general council in December. If Ramaphosa had fired Mchunu outright, could the minister have pulled off what Zuma did 20 years ago — undermine the sitting president and stage a comeback? I doubt it, but I can see why Ramaphosa may have chosen his trusted modus operandi: hold fire.
Or perhaps Ramaphosa is just protecting Mchunu, a trusted ally. After all, in 2018 Ramaphosa said: “I would rather be seen as a weak president than split the ANC, because that is not my mission. My mission is to keep the ANC united.”
Whatever the reason, Ramaphosa needs to realise that South Africans are tired of crime and corruption and that he will live to regret his decision not to fire Mchunu.
Mchunu lied to parliament in March when he was confronted with accusations of associating with a criminally connected individual. Now he has sheepishly confirmed that this person, who has received money from an accused criminal apparently on his behalf, is a “comrade”.
Not once in the whole saga has Mchunu explained why he ordered the disbandment of the political killings task team. Who was party to the decision? We know the answer: a criminal wanted the task team gone.
These are grave transgressions and Ramaphosa’s failure to fire Mchunu will come back to bite him. Soon.
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