The parliamentary inquiry into KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s allegations has put renewed scrutiny on the fate of 121 case dockets removed from the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT).
The committee has found that the movement of the dockets from KwaZulu-Natal to Pretoria had the potential to delay cases and hamper investigations, with inadequate arrangements for the allocation of dockets, the continuity of investigating officers, prosecutors and witnesses.
The finding raises a question that has yet to be fully answered: what happened to each of the 121 cases after they were removed from the task team?
The fate of the dockets is central to one of the most consequential disputes examined by Parliament, whether the decision to dismantle the PKTT disrupted investigations into politically motivated killings in a province where political assassinations have remained a persistent problem.
The committee was specifically mandated to investigate the alleged unlawful removal of 121 case dockets from the PKTT on the direction of suspended Deputy National Commissioner Shadrack Sibiya.
Its terms of reference also required it to examine the decision by then Police Minister Senzo Mchunu to disband the task team.
The dockets had already become a point of dispute before the parliamentary inquiry.
In evidence before the Madlanga Commission, SAPS officials described a complicated chain of custody involving the files.
Mary Motsepe, head of serious and violent crimes, told the commission that the 121 dockets had originated in her office before being taken over by the KZN political killings task team in 2018.
She said they were subsequently returned to her office and sent to the province again after the intervention of acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia.
Motsepe also testified that the files were taken to SAPS headquarters for an audit that could have been conducted in KwaZulu-Natal. Her team found, among other issues, missing witness statements in some of the dockets.
At the time, police said 107 of the 121 dockets related to murders involving councillors, political party members and traditional leaders.
The parliamentary inquiry has now brought a further dimension to the controversy.
Its latest deliberations indicate that the problem was not simply where the files were physically stored.
The committee found that the transfer was not accompanied by settled arrangements for docket-by-docket allocation, confirmed investigating officers, prosecutorial continuity or adequate safeguards for witnesses.
That matters because a criminal investigation is not merely a file.
It depends on continuity: investigators who know the evidence, prosecutors who understand the case, witnesses who can be traced and protected, and a clear chain of responsibility for decisions taken on the docket.
A disruption to that chain can have consequences long after a file has been moved from one office to another.
The question for SAPS and the National Prosecuting Authority is therefore what happened to the individual investigations during and after the transfer. And critically, how many experienced a measurable delay as a consequence of the transfer?
Those questions have become more important as Parliament moves towards finalising its report on the Mkhwanazi allegations.
The committee’s work has already established that the movement of the dockets created risks to investigative and prosecutorial continuity.
But establishing that risk is different from establishing its consequences in individual cases.
A docket-by-docket account could show whether those concerns translated into stalled investigations, lost witnesses, delayed arrests or weakened prosecutions.
There is also a question about responsibility.
The removal of the dockets followed Mchunu’s December 2024 directive to disband the PKTT.
Mchunu has previously told the parliamentary committee that his directive did not specify what should happen to the dockets and that he was implementing recommendations from a police research study.
Sibiya, meanwhile, was involved in the subsequent movement of the files.
The precise chain of decisions therefore matters, who ordered the dockets to be moved, who authorised their removal, who received them, who was responsible for each investigation afterwards, and when responsibility was transferred again.
The issue is particularly significant because the parliamentary committee’s mandate was not limited to determining whether the PKTT should have continued to exist. It was also tasked with examining the implications of the alleged removal of the 121 dockets.
The committee’s findings suggest that the transfer arrangements were inadequate.
But the public still needs to know what happened to the cases themselves.
For the families of people killed in politically linked violence, the difference between an administrative finding and a completed criminal investigation is profound.
A parliamentary report can establish that a system failed.
The next question is whether the state can account for the cases that passed through that failed system, and whether any of them were lost, delayed or damaged along the way.
