Police saga may define Cyril's legacy
State capture is becoming a haunting South Africanism. The term is indigenous to our shores and, although it occurs elsewhere, it has flourished on our soil.
The two words encapsulate everything that has gone wrong with the country and its institutions over the past 10 years.
Its dark spectre is once more at the heart of another scandal.
Even painted onto the backdrop of that history, KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi's aspersions are frightful. In a news briefing on Sunday, the military-clad Mkhwanazi alleged that Police Minister Senzo Mchunu is in the pocket of organised crime. The resultant rot, he says, continues to delay justice in a number of high-profile cases.
Mchunu has refuted the claims. President Cyril Ramaphosa called it 'a grave national security concern' and has promised to deal 'with it when I get home [from the Brics Summit in Brazil]'. We are witnessing the beginning of a saga that will take many turns before it is filed away.
Even with those caveats accounted for, these allegations highlight deep systemic problems that most observers have suspected lie within the country's law enforcement. These are not isolated bribes, but accounts of an infection spreading through the nervous system, from top down.
That is what we've come to painfully understand as state capture.
Ramaphoria was the belief that we now had a leader that was going to reverse the rot. It was his promised destiny to restore integrity to the state's institutions. Instead it will be his legacy if he fails to do that.
We are still waiting for the prosecutions that were predicted to result from the Zondo inquiry into state capture allegations. Whispers have long cast doubts on the National Prosecuting Authority's ability to pursue high-profile figures. The battle to keep the criminally accused out of political structures has been a fatiguing watch.
Malfeasance in the police apparatus goes beyond Ramaphosa, and even his predecessor.
A damning article in The New York Times this week reported that incidents of torture by officers are alarmingly high. The preferred method is 'tubing': a technique common during apartheid of foisting an inside tyre tube — hence the name — or plastic bag over a victim's face.
These editorial pages have dedicated an inordinate amount of space to condemning the 'shoot-to-kill' attitude that has proliferated; a hangover from a corrupt, racist regime.
If this week's allegations are true then there is no mistaking that we are living in a mafia state.
Ramaphosa has promised to make this a priority. Whether he follows through in a meaningful way will define how history remembers his presidency.
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