Overstepping thin blue line

President Cyril Ramaphosa's fingerprints are all over the personnel choices and the culture that produced this Saps mess.

- William Saunderson-Meyer

Lady Justice is neither blind, nor evenhanded.

She presides over a cynical system of judicial triage in which homicide investigations are pursued according to the political needs of the ANC.

If the victim is not a social celebrity or politically connected, the case is quietly downgraded in terms of the attention it will receive from SA Police Service (Saps). More sinisterly, if conscientious detectives tug at threads that lead to the criminal syndicates that are embedded in the police and the ANC elite, the investigation is actively sabotaged.

The Madlanga commission, as well as the parliamentary ad hoc committee, have, over the past six weeks, heard damning testimony of how politicians, police officers and major criminals happily inhabit the same ecosystem.

It's a tangled skein, but following any single thread - in recent days, the testimony relating to a hit on a Vereeniging engineer last year - maps another set of contours to Saps' collapse and criminal capture.