Considering the SSA and other intelligence services have been implicated as a key locus of State Capture in several reports, it is peculiar that the DA's Dianne Kohler Barnard should be of the view that there is no need for an industrial deep clean.

Listen to this article 13 min Listen to this article 13 min The Democratic Alliance's spokesperson on state security, Dianne Kohler Barnard, recently announced that the party had been "reliably informed that a mass bloodletting" was under way at the State Security Agency (SSA).

Senior managers had been given three weeks to apply for early retirement or face retrenchment, while the same terms would be later put to the rest of the SSA staff, she noted.

Forcing out "expertise" in this manner would be "wholly iniquitous", Kohler Barnard said, adding that while the defence and intelligence services were not regulated by the Labour Relations Act, this did not give Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, "the right to simply fire swathes of staff without reason".

What made this worse, she said, was that the Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence was still in the process of being formed.

A fork in the road

Considering the SSA and other intelligence services have been implicated as a key locus of State Capture in several reports, it is peculiar that Kohler Barnard should be of the view that there is no need for an industrial deep clean.

It is public knowledge that the services...