Like many of us, I suspect, I watched the media conference by KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi with a grim fascination. Here we had a senior police officer taking the podium to denounce the contamination by organised crime of South Africa’s security and political systems, and to name names in the elevated reaches of both. In something beyond a symbolic sense, this was a rare instance of a smoking gun.
Dressed in camouflage fatigues and flanked by masked officers decked out in tactical gear, Mkhwanazi appeared the embodiment of the tough, uncompromising protector of society. For a country sick of violence, disillusioned by corruption and frustrated at criminal impunity, Mkhwananzi cut a messianic figure.
And as a messiah he was greeted. News outlets and social media performed a virtual Mexican Wave in enthusiastic response. “Mkhwanazi presser gets South Africa talking”, said Newsroom Africa. “Mkhwanazi: the Hero we need”, intoned Mmusi Maimane in an interview with the Build One South Africa leader. “Lt-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi needs support of all patriots, without hesitation”, read a report about the views of analyst Sandile Swana. Journalist Lebo Kewa offered a reflection entitled “In defence of Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, a patriot in uniform”. An attorney, Ian Allis, went on television to declare, “Mkhwanazi was brutally honest”.
Mkhwanazi was speaking to an issue of existential importance for South Africa. Politically- motivated killings strike at the heart of a democracy. They undermine the very notion of the exchange and contestation of ideas and the exercise of choice, and they destroy accountability mechanisms. There is a direct and bloody line between the pillaging of public money and the unsolved assassinations of municipal councillors.
Nor is this entirely unusual in South Africa. A report last year by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime recorded 488 political assassinations in the country between 2000 and 2023, almost certainly an undercount. (To this might be added assassinations linked to interpersonal disputes, the taxi industry, organised crime and so on.) These have been on an overall escalation over the past two decades, with KwaZulu-Natal being ground zero for this.
System-wide failure
Such killings are arguably the most extreme edge of a system-wide failure, or what Karl Von Holdt has called “violent democracy”. As we saw in the riots of July 2021, a combination of desperation, political intrigue in the ANC and rank opportunism could shake the foundations of the country.
The notion that all this is happening with the complicity of senior police officers and a cabinet minister – who are meant, respectively, to protect and lead society – is deeply unsettling. That an honest cop is fearlessly speaking truth to power is consummately reassuring.
But watching Mkhwanazi, I felt unsettled. Yes, it’s a rarity to see a senior state official take the position that he did, but as I watched, I wondered if I could believe it. It’s a cynicism arising from long and bitter experience with South African politics and the pathologies within the South African state. Too much politics, obscene extraction, and distressingly little effective governance.
Trust is an essential quality for a successful democracy. It enables respectful deliberation and peaceful competition among citizens, an acceptance of one’s inclusion in political processes, irrespective of whether one’s preferred positions prevail or not.
There is a wealth of polling evidence that South Africa is a low-trust society. Afrobarometer’s latest round of polling, for 2022, shows most South Africans distrusting one another and virtually all institutions; (close relatives and the media being notable exceptions).
South Africa’s police are particularly distrusted. Some 66% of South Africans do not trust the police “at all” or “just a little”. 43% say “not at all”: a figure that has more than doubled since 2011, when it stood at 18%. Similarly, 61% believe that most or all police officers are corrupt. These are deeply concerning numbers, and while impressionistic, they speak to very real experiences of insecurity, state ineptitude and the pathologies that afflict the country.
This has been propelled by high-profile instances of police malfeasance, and an often-desultory response from the country’s political leadership. Nowhere was this more on display than in the career of Jackie Selebi, National Commissioner and first African head of Interpol, who was fingered for corruption while holding both offices. Then President Thabo Mbeki responded to concerns raised by a delegation of religious leaders by saying “Trust me”. One of his interlocutors told a journalist: “If the President says ‘Trust me,’ am I going to question him?” For good reason, I’d expect a different response now.
Hazardous volatility
The trust deficit injects a hazardous volatility into our politics. Is Mkhwanazi a hero, a patriot in need of our unqualified support? Maybe. Possibly. Probably? But we as a country have had to contend with a prevailing culture in which almost every claim to public-spiritedness will be viewed with scepticism.
Or, fearful of the state of things, we look for the deliverer, in this case Mkhwanazi. And we ignore the disturbing signals that attend them – for me, this was in the show of force by the armed and masked officers flanking him in the manner of a Praetorian Guard.
I’d like to believe that we have an honest cop acting out of a sense of civic and professional duty. I’d be relieved if this dealt a blow to the corruption that plagues our state and society. Unfortunately, I’ve been disappointed too often to be confident in this instance.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentza/50036692557]
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