By Johnathan Paoli
Suspended Police Minister Senzo Mchunu has blamed the South African Police Service’s lack of combat and intelligence capacity for the country’s persistent violent crime, saying the crisis justified his structural reforms and the controversial disbandment of the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT).
Appearing before the Parliament’s ad-hoc committee, Mchunu said the decision to dissolve the PKTT was part of a broader reorganisation plan intended to strengthen operational policing nationwide, not to undermine specialised investigations into political killings.
“SAPS doesn’t have good capacity on the combative side. That’s why problems on the Cape Flats persist, because the police don’t have the machinery to fight the gangs,” Mchunu said.
Mchunu described the police service as overstretched, underfunded and technologically backward.
“Visible policing takes up 53% of the budget and it is under one divisional commissioner, who can’t take charge of each station and run each of the task teams. When you look at some police stations, you cannot believe people are working there,” he said.
He said the new SAPS organisational structure, finalised in May last year, created a dedicated division for operational response services, designed to respond to violent crime and gang hotspots.
The minister said the structure was the result of an extensive work study meant to “deal with what was happening on the ground”, not an attempt to interfere with ongoing investigations.
“You couldn’t keep relegating the lives of the people of South Africa in favour of councillors and amakhosi,” he said, arguing that the police must focus on ordinary citizens’ safety.
Mchunu also questioned the ethics of maintaining elite investigative units for politicians while ordinary citizens faced sluggish police response times.
“The PKTT made use of specialised ways of investigating, but normal people had to make do with traditional investigations. To me, this is one of the ticking bombs in the South African Police Service, it talks to your ethics,” the minister said.
He called this disparity “unconstitutional”, saying it entrenched inequality in law enforcement.
Mchunu said the PKTT was never budgeted for by national SAPS, adding that he did not know where they secured their funding from.
He told the committee that his frustrations had reached a breaking point by December last year, prompting him to write the directive disbanding the PKTT on New Year’s Eve.
He defended his authority under the Constitution to issue such instructions to the national commissioner.
Mchunu said the Seventh Administration’s policing priorities demanded eliminating “duplicate structures” and redirecting scarce resources to frontline operations.
He said he was confident that once the new organogram was fully implemented, it would have an impact on crime.
The committee will reconvene on Friday to continue hearing testimony from Mchunu, with cross-examinations to commence next week Tuesday.
INSIDE POLITICS