Ah, Chief Dwasaho! This week’s special sitting of the ad hoc parliamentary committee investigating judicial capture and political interference in the South African Police Service (SAPS) did the unthinkable: it held its proceedings inside Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Centre.
Not the People’s Parliament, but the People’s Penitentiary. A decision that will go down as one of the more theatrical chapters in our young democracy.
Parliament inside prison
For a brief but powerful moment, it felt as though the long-suffering taxpayers of this country – the very citizens who keep Parliament’s lights on – were holding their breath. Our collective imagination finally aligned with our sense of justice: the lawmakers meeting in a building usually reserved for lawbreakers.
Members of Parliament (MPs) came perilously close to wearing orange, not in symbolic protest but in poetic justice: the colour of accountability, the colour that says nobody is above the law.
It was a chilling thought: not one, not two, but 11 MPs, the very guardians of democratic accountability, are suddenly under a different spotlight, the kind that doesn’t come with a parliamentary switch-off button. Citizens have long whispered that some of these esteemed honourables belong not in cushioned benches, but behind high-security gates. This week, the whisper became a possibility. The line between high office and prison cell block blurred.
Permission to pee
My leader, it was also momentarily pleasing – delicious even – to witness the scene no South African taxpayer ever expected to see in their lifetime: alleged drug-cartel kingpin and commander of the “Big Five” criminal economy, Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, meekly raising his hand to ask for permission to go to the bathroom.
For five brief minutes, we saw the impossible made possible: accountability in its rawest form, without self-granted concessions. Because in his colourful life of smoke-filled dingy houses, secret bank accounts and whispered hit lists, Cat Matlala has never asked anyone for permission; he grants it to himself – a silence here, an evasion there, and concessions enforced by bullets and fear.
According to the State, he has at least 11 times allegedly taken the liberty of deciding who may live and who must die – 11 moments when he acted as judge, jury and undertaker. As an aside, he is a bad shot, or his people are amateurs – 11 attempted murders.
Yet here he was, reduced to the humility of asking for a restroom break under the fluorescent lights of a correctional facility. For once, the country witnessed power without swagger, crime without the ballet of bodyguards, and a man who has allegedly moved money, drugs and death across borders now requesting access to the toilet like a schoolboy waiting in front of a strict headmaster.
That single moment spoke louder than the entire three decades of speeches on accountability, oversight and the rule of law. It proved something we fear has died in this country: even the untouchables can be touched. Even the men who act like they own the night can be summoned into the light. And even the Big Five must eventually stand in a queue and wait their turn, “to pee” inside the prison.
Connect the dots
My leader, at snail’s pace, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi – KwaZulu-Natal’s top cop and the reluctant commander of what I now call the 06 July Revolution – is finally being seen not as a man speaking into the void, but as the one who forced the country to pay attention.
This was no riot, no political coup d’état and no sinister plot. It began as a media briefing that turned into a national awakening. He stood before the nation and said the unthinkable: that our policing crisis was not born in the streets, but in the boardrooms, WhatsApp groups and political corridors where money, power and criminal enterprise had already shaken hands.
And now the storyline is writing itself, like a confession signed in slow motion.
The fall of the other Mkhwanazi
First came the suspension: the City of Ekurhuleni placed Deputy Chief, Brigadier Julius Mkhwanazi of the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department (EMPD), on suspension.
The official explanation was routine, but the subtext signalled allegations before the Madlanga Commission that, if proven, point to systemic rot in municipal policing rather than a lone officer gone astray. It pointed to the rot taking shape at the heart of municipal policing: not one errant officer, but a culture where authority and accountability have begun to walk in opposite directions.
At the centre of the storm is a controversial agreement signed – allegedly without proper authority – between the EMPD and Cat Matlala’s private Cat VIP security firm, under which Matlala’s vehicles were given blue lights reserved for law enforcement. Witnesses before the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry told the presiding judge that the memorandum of understanding was fraudulent or misrepresented the nature of the arrangement.
Instead of acting as a gatekeeper between lawful policing and organised crime, EMPD – under Mkhwanazi – appears to have morphed into a gateway, funnelling state privileges to a private actor with alleged criminal ties. As one former EMPD official reportedly put it: the deal effectively outsourced law-enforcement permissions to a man already accused of running a criminal network.
A woman of steel, Lieutenant Colonel Kelebogile Thepa
My leader, heartwarmingly, and perhaps prophetically, the woman who found herself at the receiving end of Mkhwanazi’s theatrics was no timid clerk hiding behind protocol, but Lieutenant Colonel Kelebogile Thepa, the Head of Media and Public Relations at EMPD.
When the self-appointed “blue-light Caesar” attempted to re-engineer a public institution into a private convoy for dubious associates, it was Thepa who became the unexpected line of defence – refusing to bend, refusing to sanitise the irregularities, and refusing to let the badge be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Her reinstatement to her substantive post not only restored the EMPD Media and Public Relations Unit, but it also restored the idea that a public office still belongs to the public, not to the underworld masquerading in police uniform. Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo!
Cat & leg irons
Then Cat Matlala, testifying from behind the steel gates of Kgosi Mampuru II, claims that a single phone call from former police minister Bheki Cele led to the release of what he calls his “precious cargo” – not a human being, but weaponry.
Whether or not that allegation stands up to evidence, it says something about the perception of power in this country: that one former ministerial intervention can do more than a thousand investigations.
Cat, a man with nine children, told the nation that both Cele and Mr Brown Mogotsi asked him for money. He said he gave Cele a total of R500,000, payable in two instalments. In a bold move, Cat said Cele lied before Parliament when he downplayed their association and concealed receipt of illicit payments.
Grim playlist
Then the roll call of dead DJs and their protectors/associates starts to read like a grim playlist.
At the centre sits murder-accused “businessman” Katiso “KT” Molefe, fingered in court as the alleged mastermind behind the 2022 assassination of Oupa John Sefoka – better known as DJ Sumbody – and the killings of his two bodyguards in Gauteng.
Molefe and several co-accused now face charges not only for DJ Sumbody’s murder, but also for the killing of producer Hector “DJ Vintos” Buthelezi and other high-profile hits.
Ballistics experts told the Madlanga Commission that a single AK-47 rifle – seized in a case tied to Molefe – has been positively linked to a chain of murder scenes: DJs and, most crucially, engineer Armand Swart in Vereeniging, and businessman Don Tindleni.
Police have since confirmed that this same gun, along with two pistols recovered in related raids, is connected to at least 18 murders and attempted-murder dockets, and that some of those firearms litter an evidence trail that also touches alleged cartel boss “Cat” Matlala.
Comrade Leadership, the minnows and crime bosses are shivering in their boots. Lieutenant General Mkhwanazi told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
This week, sitting high court judge Portia Phahlane was arrested on charges of corruption and money-laundering, accused of taking bribes to influence a major church-succession case. That arrest underlines the message that Mkhwanazi delivered: no cloak of rank or office robes can shield criminality from justice.
Till next week, my man. Send me nowhere, ke-Dezember Boss, soon. DM
Bhekisisa Mncube is an author and columnist who won the national 2024 Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Award for columns/editorials, as well as the same category at the regional 2020 Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards.