In the cut-throat arena of post-liberation statecraft, where factional cartels masquerade as crusaders for clean governance, few manoeuvres have been as audaciously miscalculated as the 6 July press briefing staged by the M-M-K (General Masemola, Lieutenant General Mkhwanazi and their trusted lieutenant Khumalo). They wanted to stop Minister Senzo Mchunu from making changes and keep their strong grip on the police and crime intelligence units. Instead, the operation has detonated in their faces with spectacular, self-inflicted collateral damage. One useful thing that came out of it, was to show us how much serious problems exists inside our security and crime intelligence services. For that unintended public service, as a nation we must, however reluctantly, register a measure of gratitude.
The press briefing was never really about the decision to disband the PKTT nor did it have anything to do with Minister Senzo Mchunu being part of any criminal syndicate but was a brazen counter-offensive, a fightback by a rival factional cartel determined to achieve total hegemonic capture of the security and intelligence cluster. Let us be clinically precise and ideologically unflinching: this entire spectacle had zero demonstrable connection to any criminal cartel or syndicate involving Minister Senzo Mchunu nor has they been any iota of direct, admissible evidence that has surfaced to link the Minister to any underworld syndicate or prove that Mchunu violated any protocol, regulation or constitutional prescript when he exercised his executive prerogative to disband the PKTT. The relentless attempt to drag the name of the Minister into the quagmire was nothing but a classic smokescreen operation — a textbook case of projection.
The July 6 theatre was not an act of whistleblowing; it was a pre-emptive regime-change-by-press-conference. The timing was everything, remember General Masemola was already at the very gates of incarceration — his personal and institutional vulnerabilities threatening to unravel the entire patronage network they had so carefully cultivated, this was a desperate bid to invert the power equation before the axe of accountability fell on the wrong necks.
The real question is no longer whether rot exists in the security cluster — it clearly does — but which cartel, under which flaf, seeks to become its new sole proprietor. Minister Mchunu’s decision to disband PKTT was not the crime; it was the necessary surgical incision to prevent one factional malignancy from metastasizing into full-blown state capture 2.0. I write this words fully cognisant that I shall be branded an apologist or worse — for in the current political moment Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi has been elevated to the status of secular saint, the untouchable national hero whose utterances is treated as gospel by large sections of the commentariat, but history teaches me to treat such rapid canonisation with forensic skepticism, that sometimes loud applause are the velvet glove that conceals the iron fist of continued instrumentalisation.
Until we stop treating power struggles as heroic battles, our country will keep going through the same cycles of drama and counter-drama.
My name is Nelson Dieta Motjhapalong Mokoena, the Duke of Fezile Dabi and I write independently in my own personal capacity.
