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The Madlanga Commission model combining investigators, lawyers, powers to subpoena, televised proceedings and accelerated prosecutions, should be applied to alleged police/law enforcement/gangster collusion across the country – not least in gang-ravaged Cape Town.

The sterling work of Judge Mbuyiseli Madlanga and his co-commissioners Senior Counsel Advocates Sesi Baloyi and Sandile Khumalo has done more than spotlight dirty police and Metro law enforcement officials at National level, in KwaZulu-Natal and the Ekurhuleni Municipality – it is demonstrating to South Africa that accountability and the rule of law are not dead.

Judicial commissions of inquiry are expensive, narrowly focused and time bound. The means must nonetheless be found to establish a permanent structure to continue the Madlanga Commission’s work focusing on the integrity of the criminal justice system on the handover of its final report. The work of this structure will initially be intense but should reduce and cost much less as it progressively weeds out rotten apples. 

The Madlanga Commission has made household names of the likes Julius Mkhwanazi, the suspended Deputy Chief of the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Police, and a cast of associates, for alleged tender fraud, collusion with organised crime, and murder, among other matters. 

It has further revealed the expanse of the collusion, involving junior and senior police and civil servants; and it has demonstrated the power of open hearings compared to the potential hazards inherent in more secretive approaches to investigations and prosecutions – such as that of IDAC.

Cape Town is South Africa’s gang and murder capital. Here, among other unresolved matters of interest: 

1.  Charges of tender fraud and corruption against senior members of the underworld and a former DA Mayco member were recently provisionally withdrawn;

2.  The construction mafia and extortionists are running amok;  

3.  The head of the City of Cape Town’s so-called Special Investigations Unit Reynold Talmakkies, a former policeman hired while facing charges related to interfering in justice in Mpumalanga, retired in 2024 on the day his disciplinary hearing was set to commence. Prior to his departure, Talmakkies was accused of seeking to intimidate a magistrate presiding over a gang murder case in which his son was an accrued;

4.  Residents of gang-plagued communities have alleged collusion between police and gangsters for decades;

5.  Apartheid-era collusion between police and gangsters revealed nearly 30 years ago at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), including in the manufacture and distribution of drugs, has never been investigated and it is unknown if old networks were ever properly dismantled.    

Cleaning up the police is not a magic potion that will make the long-entrenched culture of gangsterism in Cape Town disappear. For that to happen, the social, structural and spatial injustices engineered in the past need systematic dismantling.

There is no doubting, however, that a clean and functional criminal justice system is one of the ingredients on which a future Cape Town should be able to depend.

Issued by GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament Brett Herron