National police commissioner said that Mkhwanazi or Khumalo never briefed the police minister before his decision to disband the task team.
National police commissioner Fannie Masemola says he does not know who advised then police minister Senzo Mchunu to disband the political killings task team (PKTT).
Masemola told the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry on Monday that the initial term for the task team was six months, which he later extended by a further six months and then a year.
“Eventually, we had to make it permanent. During the first and second six months, the courts would postpone their cases beyond the team’s mandate so that by the time the cases came to court, the team was no longer there,” Masemola said.
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“This forced us to announce that the team was permanent; otherwise, cases were not being tried.”
Task team successes
In his alleged letter communicating the disbandment of the task team on 31 December 2024, Mchunu said in part that the team was not “adding any value to policing in South Africa. I therefore direct that the political killings task team be disestablished immediately.”
However, Masemola told the commission he did not know how Mchunu arrived at the conclusion that the task team was not effective without consultations with the relevant parties.
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“For one to come to that conclusion, you must have done an assessment. Obviously, you will talk to people who are dealing with the matter at hand. He would have had a briefing from Mkhwanazi, Dumisani Khumalo or me,” said Masemola.
“To come to that conclusion without having this briefing, I wonder who briefed him, because for sure I know nobody knows the work of the team better than those, unless you went to the junior commanders of the team. We inquired, but that was not the case.”
Following Mchunu’s letter, Masemola said Khumalo met with the minister in an attempt to “convince” him that the decision to disband was “ill-advised”, to no avail.
Masemola spoke of the task team’s “unmatched success rate”, highlighting that since June 2018, 297 case dockets had been finalised.
Out of the 612 total dockets, 125 are still under investigation, 114 are at various courts, while 10 are pending a decision from the Director of Public Prosecutions on whether to prosecute.
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