South Africa announces commission to investigate police scandal

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Cyril Ramaphosa has suspended South Africa’s police minister and appointed a commission to investigate a series of explosive allegations against senior law enforcement and judicial officials in a crisis that heaps pressure on the country’s fragile coalition.

In a national address on Sunday evening, the president announced a judicial commission of inquiry would look into allegations that top officials, including current and former cabinet members, were sabotaging investigations into politically motivated killings.

“These allegations, if proven true, threaten to undermine the confidence of South Africans in the ability of the police service to protect them and to effectively fight crime and corruption,” Ramaphosa said.

It is the latest crisis to rock the government of national unity (GNU) headed by the president’s African National Congress. The coalition formed just over a year ago after the ANC lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since the introduction of democratic elections in 1994.

Ramaphosa’s trip to Brazil for a Brics summit was interrupted last week by a series of allegations against Senzo Mchunu, his police minister and a key ally.

Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, a police commissioner in KwaZulu-Natal province, accused Mchunu of sabotaging probes into political assassinations in a case that has gripped a nation suffering from a rise in crime.

In a television interview a week ago during which he wore combat fatigues and was surrounded by masked, heavily-armed officers, Mkhwanazi claimed Mchunu had disbanded a police task force that had discovered a syndicate linked to politicians, high-ranking business people and prosecutors.

Mchunu, an ANC loyalist who analysts consider a potential future leadership candidate, denies the allegations against him. 

South Africa’s soaring crime rates have come under an increasing global spotlight. US President Donald Trump has peddled a false narrative that among those hardest hit are white Afrikaner farmers.

After a decade of so-called “state capture” under former president Jacob Zuma, in which state coffers were plundered and corruption became rampant, repeated widely-respected commissions have revealed weakening state oversight and assaults on democratic institutions.

But many South Africans, already weary of some of the world’s highest murder rates, feel that announcing a commission is a lacklustre response by a president who vowed that violent crime would be “halved, if not eliminated” after assuming power in 2019, only for murder rates to increase.

The ANC has been beset by corruption allegations in recent weeks, increasing tensions with its senior partner, the business-friendly Democratic Alliance, which has floated the idea of a vote of no confidence against the president.

In June, Ramaphosa abruptly fired the deputy minister of trade, a DA politician. The party’s leader John Steenhuisen called the move “a calculated assault on the governing coalition” and demanded the president similarly axe “corruption-accused ANC ministers”.

The former opposition party has filed corruption charges against an ANC cabinet member and said it would “vote against the budgets of corrupt ministers”, raising further questions about a coalition investors had hoped would deliver desperately-needed reforms to an economy that grew by just 0.6 per cent last year.

Opposition parties also criticised the president’s actions. ActionSA, a party created by a former DA mayor, said Mchunu’s leave of absence was in effect a “paid holiday”.

The “delayed action . . . amounts to kicking the can down the road in confronting the deepening crisis within the South African Police Service and the broader criminal justice system”, the party said.

Louw Nel, a senior political analyst at Oxford Economics, said: “Weary South Africans looking at the coalition from the outside are left wondering, what will the ANC and DA fight over next? Increasingly, people are no longer asking if the GNU will fail but rather when.”