Top policeman reportedly shakes South Africa with explosive allegations about his boss

A highly respected police officer has reportedly shaken South Africa’s government – and won the admiration of many ordinary people – with his explosive allegations that organised crime groups have penetrated the upper echelons of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration.

BBC reported that Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi did it in dramatic style – dressed in military-like uniform and surrounded by masked police officers with automatic weapons, he called a press conference to accuse Police Minister, Senzo Mchunu, of having ties to criminal gangs.

He also said his boss had closed down an elite unit investigating political murders after it uncovered a drug cartel with tentacles in the business sector, prison department, prosecution service and judiciary.

“We are on combat mode, I am taking on the criminals directly,” he declared, in an address broadcast live on national TV earlier this month.

South Africans have long been concerned about organised crime, which, leading crime expert, Dr Johan Burger, pointed out, was at a “very serious level”.

One of the most notorious cases was that of South Africa’s longest-serving police chief, Jackie Selebi, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2010 after being convicted of taking bribes from an Italian drug lord, Glen Agliotti, in exchange for turning a blind eye to his criminal activity.

But Mkhwanazi’s intervention was unprecedented – the first time that a police officer had publicly accused a cabinet member, let alone the one in charge of policing, of having links to criminal gangs.

The reaction was instantaneous.

Mchunu dismissed the allegations as “wild and baseless” and said he “stood ready to respond to the accusations”, but the public rallied around Gen Mkhwanazi – the police commissioner in KwaZulu-Natal – despite the province also being Mchunu’s political turf.

#HandsoffNhlanhlaMkhwanazi topped the trends list on X, in a warning shot to the government not to touch the 52-year-old officer.

“He’s [seen as] a no-nonsense person who takes the bull by the horn,” Calvin Rafadi, a crime expert based at South Africa’s University of Johannesburg, told the BBC.

Mkhwanazi first earned public admiration almost 15 years ago when, in his capacity as South Africa’s acting police chief, he suspended crime intelligence boss, Richard Mdluli, a close ally of then-President Jacob Zuma.

Mdluli was later sentenced to five years in jail for kidnapping, assault, and intimidation, vindicating Gen Mkhwanazi’s view that he was a rotten apple within the police service.

Mkhwanazi faced enormous pressure to shield Mdluli, with his political bosses assuming that the officer, aged only 38 at the time, would be “open to manipulation [but] they were grossly mistaken”, said Burger.

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