Deputy police minister Polly Boshielo says she is not aware that suspended police minister Senzo Mnchunu was corrupt or that he was protecting drug cartels.
Testifying before parliament’s ad hoc committee on Tuesday, Boshielo said: “The danger is that anybody can implicate you tomorrow…there will always be misinformation.”
Boshielo said the ad hoc committee and the Madlanga commission, which are both probing allegations of criminality, political interference and corruption in the criminal justice system, would determine whether Mchunu was corrupt or had been protecting drug cartels.
Patriotic Alliance MP Ashley Sauls asked her about issues between Mchunu and national police commissioner Gen Fannie Masemola that Boshielo said she was concerned about.
“We are working together as a team, and as we work together, we have different leadership skills and different thinking,” Boshielo said. “We saw that the minister and the national commissioner were normally writing letters [to each other] when we should be discussing issues.
“When you write a person a letter, it is like you are starting a disciplinary file.”
Boshielo said she observed that there wasn’t a good relationship between the suspended deputy national commissioner for crime intelligence, Lt-Gen Shadrack Sibiya, and KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, which she and other officials wanted sorted out.
Boshielo, who showed the committee her busy diary, said the notion that deputy ministers earn their salaries without doing anything was incorrect.
We are working together as a team, and as we work together, we have different leadership skills and different thinking.
— Deputy police minister Polly Boshielo
ActionSA MP Dereleen James said the deputy minister could be keeping busy but doing “absolutely nothing”.
James said keeping busy does not translate to an impact that would respond to the crime patterns unfolding in communities.
She asked if Boshielo was aware that police were investigating a possible attempted hit on Brown Mogotsi — an alleged associate of Mchunu — on Monday night.
Boshielo said she was not aware of the incident as she was preparing her appearance before the committee.
James said: “Just this weekend, [six] people were gunned down in Reiger Park [in Boksburg, Ekurhuleni]. Mothers were assassinated. The people [senior police officers] who are embroiled in this should have been on the scene assisting.”
She said South Africans were seeing a disconnect between the minister and his two deputies, who were meant to be working “hand-in-glove”.
Boshielo said she agreed that they needed to work in a coordinated manner to combat crime.
Earlier, Boshielo said she first learnt of the letter disbanding the political killings task team on social media and initially thought it was a fake.
She said Mchunu contacted her in early January to tell her that the letter was legitimate and that he had written it.
“I was a little bit disappointed because I thought we [Mchunu and I] were working together, and before he could [issue] the letter, I thought he could have maybe discussed it with us [deputy ministers]. But maybe as the executive authority, he felt that he didn’t want to discuss it with me.”
Sowetan