Sidelined Police Minister Senzo Mchunu has repeatedly cited extreme violence in Cape Town's apartheid dumping grounds - the Cape Flats - as one of the reasons he ordered a police team's disbandment. In doing so, he has inadvertently highlighted how gangs and politics overlap.
Sidelined Police Minister Senzo Mchunu has repeatedly cited extreme violence in Cape Town's apartheid dumping grounds - the Cape Flats - as one of the reasons he ordered a police team's disbandment. In doing so, he has inadvertently highlighted how gangs and politics overlap.
If we take sidelined Police Minister Senzo Mchunu for his word, he was incredibly worried about violence continuously claiming lives in Cape Town suburbs that have become known as gang hotspots.
This crisis seems to have tormented him to the point that he cited it as among the reasons he issued a highly controversial directive, on 31 December 2024, to disband KwaZulu-Natal's Political Killings Task Team (PKTT).
"If you keep on funding one unit somewhere in one corner of the country, even if they do well, they are not going to deal with criminality in the Cape Flats.
"Our consciences are going to be gouged on an hourly basis because, every time there is a death in the Cape Flats, you are asked: 'What are you doing about it?' You can't say: 'I have the Political Killings Task Team' which is operating in one corner," Mchunu recently told Parliament's ad hoc committee.
About 400 people, he...
