By Nco Dube | 25 September 2026

The ANC has found its voice on unlawful political instructions. It has found it at the wrong end of the chain of command.

During deliberations on the ad hoc committee’s draft report into Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s allegations, ANC MPs argued that National Police Commissioner Fannie Masemola should have resisted suspended Police Minister Senzo Mchunu’s directive to halt appointments in Crime Intelligence. ANC MP Khusela Sangoni said the committee should send a strong message empowering accounting officers to resist political pressure. Committee chair Soviet Lekganyane reminded members that Masemola had said defying the directive would have been “career limiting”.

The ANC wants us to admire its sudden concern for the independence of public officials. Before we do, it should explain why its concern begins with the man who received the instruction and grows faint as it approaches the man who gave it.

On 31 December 2024, Mchunu instructed Masemola to disband the Political Killings Task Team and imposed a moratorium on filling Crime Intelligence vacancies. The instruction bore the authority of a minister. It did not arrive anonymously at police headquarters. Yet the ANC’s emerging lesson from this affair appears to be that the official who feared the consequences of resisting must face the sternest lecture, while the politician who created the confrontation is handled with exquisite care.

If Masemola failed in his duty, hold him accountable. First, though, follow the instruction to its source. The ANC seems willing to trace responsibility only until it reaches an ANC minister.

A sudden respect for principle

For more than a year, the party has had ample opportunity to demonstrate its concern about Mchunu’s directives. Instead, its representatives have repeatedly demanded caution over conclusions adverse to him. In August, news reports described ANC chief whip Mdumiseni Ntuli opposing a finding that Mchunu had been influenced by Mary de Haas or Brown Mogotsi in disbanding the task team. His argument was that the evidence did not support it.

That argument deserves to be heard. Allegations must be tested, even when they concern a politician whose conduct has become deeply troubling. But the ANC cannot ask for every possible qualification when Mchunu is under examination, then reach for the language of moral clarity when Masemola’s conduct comes up. A principle applied with such uneven enthusiasm begins to look like party protection dressed for a committee meeting.

News reports on the committee’s deliberations have described material inconsistencies in Mchunu’s evidence and serious disruption after task team dockets were moved. In at least some cases, investigative and prosecutorial continuity suffered. Arrangements for investigators, prosecutors and witnesses had not been properly settled. These are not clerical details. They concern live investigations into political killings and the people who depended on those investigations continuing.

Mchunu has been given a fair opportunity to explain why he issued his instructions, on what authority, and with what understanding of their consequences. He was woefully unconvincing. Masemola must answer for how he responded. The committee’s report should do both. What it cannot do with any credibility is pronounce itself tough on unlawful instructions by dwelling on the recipient while tiptoeing around their author.

Masemola has said Mchunu did not consult him before directing the task team’s disbandment. He preferred a gradual winding down and sought reasons from the minister. Those steps may have been inadequate. Stalling an instruction is not the same as formally challenging it. But they also show how misleading it would be to present this as a decision that began and ended at the Commissioner’s desk.

If the ANC now considers the Crime Intelligence moratorium unlawful, it must confront the obvious question: what does it propose should happen to Mchunu for imposing it? It cannot turn the minister’s instruction into the Commissioner’s scandal simply by starting its account one signature too late.

The courage demanded of everyone else

Masemola’s explanation that resistance would have been career limiting will irritate many people. It should. The National Commissioner holds one of the most powerful positions in the state. We are entitled to expect him to defend the law, record his objections, seek advice and refuse an instruction he knows to be unlawful.

But irritation is no substitute for understanding how power works in the public service.

Senior officials are told they have independent legal duties. They also work within relationships in which politicians can make their professional lives untenable. A principled objection can be recast as disloyalty. An official can lose access, authority or the prospect of renewal long before any court has decided who was right. The threat need not be written down to be understood.

The Public Service Commission has described the tightrope senior managers walk between political principals and their duties to the state. It has pointed to the pressure ministers and MECs have placed on officials to take improper decisions. Even the Minister of Public Service and Administration has acknowledged political interference, unstable relationships and gaps in accountability. The ANC knows this terrain. It has governed it for three decades.

That knowledge makes its new sermon to Masemola difficult to stomach. The party cannot preside over a system in which an official’s career may depend on accommodating a minister, then express surprise that an official feared the cost of saying no. Nor can it empower accounting officers with a paragraph in a committee report while declining to confront the politicians who make resistance dangerous.

None of this absolves Masemola. Public office carries duties precisely because obedience to a superior cannot always be trusted to produce lawful conduct. But accountability has to travel in both directions. If officials alone pay for political interference, the lesson to the next official will be devastatingly clear: defy the minister and risk your career; follow him and risk your reputation. The minister, meanwhile, waits to see which outcome is more convenient.

The Constitution gives the Police Minister a role in setting policing policy and issuing directions. It gives the National Commissioner responsibility for controlling and managing the police service. Neither office is a licence to disregard the law. Any finding on the legality of these particular directives must rest on the evidence. The ANC’s own position, however, makes it impossible to discuss Masemola’s alleged failure to resist without discussing Mchunu’s decision to issue them.

Why this moment is so revealing

The timing gives the ANC’s intervention an especially bitter edge. On 22 September, criminal charges against Masemola in the separate Medicare24 tender matter were formally withdrawn. The National Director of Public Prosecutions found no reasonable prospect of a successful prosecution on the Public Finance Management Act charges and said the handling of the case would be examined for possible misconduct.

The Madlanga Commission has also heard deeply troubling testimony from an IDAC prosecutor who alleged an “orchestrated attack” on Masemola and Crime Intelligence head Dumisani Khumalo. The withdrawal of the charges does not answer every question about that prosecution. It makes those questions harder to brush aside.

Then, within days, the ANC advanced its argument that Masemola should be called to account for failing to stand up to Mchunu. The timing does not prove a hidden motive. It does expose the party to an unavoidable question: why does its appetite for decisive accountability seem sharpest when directed at Masemola and so carefully rationed when directed at Mchunu?

This committee was established to get beneath allegations of political interference in policing. It should resist becoming another place where political power determines how far an inquiry is allowed to follow an instruction. It must examine the legality of Mchunu’s directives, the reasons he gave for them, their effect on investigations and the adequacy of Masemola’s response. Where consequences are warranted, they must reach whoever bears responsibility.

The ANC says it wants to teach public officials courage. It could begin by showing some of its own. A party that demands defiance from a Commissioner while hesitating to confront its minister is offering the public service a cruel bargain. It asks officials to risk their careers for the rule of law, then reserves political loyalty for the person who put them at risk.

If the instruction was unlawful, accountability must begin where it began: with the politician who issued it. Anything less is a sermon on courage from a party that has misplaced its own.