By Lesedi Sibiya-Diplomatic Insider
These are indeed grueling times that the nation of South Africa finds itself in. The constant unearthing of untethered corruption seems to be the hill that South Africa is willing to die on. However in the midst of all this corrupted fog that our ministers and nation leaders created seems to be clearing, and it’s being cleared by one Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner.
In July 2025, a series of bold statements and allegations were made by Lt-Gen Mkhwanazi against now suspended Minister of Police, Senzo Mchunu, over the disgraced Police Minister’s abrupt disbandment of the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) which is a national task team which was established in 2018 after the murder of ANC member Musawenkosi Mchunu occurred in Pietermaritzburg.
Mkhwanazi presented this information at a press briefing which took the entire country by storm and created what is now known as the “Madlanga Commission” of inquiry.
Since September the commission has unearthed a series of accounts which discuss the unlawful disbandment of the task team with Mkhwanazi sparing no detail into the allegations made against Senzo Mchunu.
The reason for the task team being disbanded is because the Minister of Police is allegedly affiliated with various crime syndicates that the Task Team could have potentially uncovered as they were reviewing a total of 600 dockets with 50 of them being linked to political indiscrepancies.
National Police Commissioner Fannie Masemola has also backed these claims stating that Mchunu never consulted him over the task team dissolving.
Time and time again there’s been various commissions of inquiry dedicated to solving crimes of corruption however one could wonder if any of these corrupt leaders will ever face the consequences of their actions.
One may even wonder if those attempts were just cosmetic ploys at winning the trust of the general public, but there seems to be something different about this attempt this time around, as that seems to be the boldness of KwaZulu Natal’s police commissioner.
Mkhwanazi speaks in such a way that nobody in senior positions has ever spoken before, he speaks with true conviction over his superiors as it is clear that there is one apple that has certainly not gone bad, in fact quite the contrary.
For a greater bulk of this current decade and perhaps even further than that the South African Police Service (SAPS) are notorious for not fulfilling their duties of protecting the citizens of South Africa and it seems to have gotten worse.
In fact the poor service delivery of SAPS has even gotten the country praising Mkhwanazi for doing the bare minimum: his job. However despite these concerns there seems to be a glimmer of light over whether this spirit of honesty from Mkhwanazi will force the leaders of this country to take a genuine look at themselves, will there ever be true justice.