CHARLES MATSEKE | Blue Lights and blood money: The Cartelization of the South African state

South Africa is fast beginning to mirror Colombia’s dark 1980s, a nation where the line between the state and the syndicate dissolves under the weight of corruption, fear, and impunity.

Tembisa Hospital now resembles Medellín, a fortress of looted contracts and shadow procurement while the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department (EMPD) has become Antioquia in uniform: a law-enforcement arm that protects privilege, not people.

In this Republic of Commissions, where oversight is performative and accountability outsourced, the rule of law has been privatized into a commodity bought, sold, and bartered by those who should be upholding it.

Here, moral insolvency reigns and the state’s monopoly on legitimate force has been leased to the highest bidder.

By the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel had evolved from a smuggling syndicate into a narco-political apparatus. A parallel state with its own intelligence, enforcement, and welfare systems. At its peak, it earned around US$420 million per week, exporting nearly 80% of global cocaine supply.

Medellín and surrounding Antioquia became semi-autonomous zones where the cartel exercised de facto sovereignty, imposed taxes, funded housing, schools and soccer fields, and in return earned the nickname El Patrón del Pueblo the People’s Boss. Crime blurred with populism and violence was wrapped in philanthropy.

Four decades later, South Africa’s version of Medellín is less bloody but no less corrosive. The tools of capture are tenders, blue lights, and commissions of inquiry.

Oversight bodies multiply, prosecutions stall and “reform” becomes a permanent holding pattern. The Republic of Commissions thrives on investigations that never end, dockets that disappear, and whistle-blowers who die waiting for justice.

Once a provincial health facility, Tembisa Hospital has become shorthand for the procurement underworld. Investigations link companies tied to Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala and other politically connected fixers to inflated tenders and ghost suppliers.

What Medellín achieved with cash and bullets, Tembisa perfectswith invoices and front companies.

The mechanics are identical: capture an institution that touches the poor, extract rents through procurement, weaponize bureaucracy against reformers, and rely on political patrons to sanitize the loot. In this theatre, healthcare becomes a conduit for extraction, and patients become collateral damage in a war for contracts.

The Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department (EMPD) mirrors Antioquia’s paramilitary policing of Escobar’s time. Reports now suggest EMPD vehicles have been used for cable theft, and senior officials have worked in tandem with CAT VIP Services, a private outfit originally contracted for VIP escort duties. What began as blue-light glamour mutated into a shadow police economy, escorts for pay, intelligence for hire, and protection sold to the highest bidder.

When law enforcement becomes the logistics arm of organized crime, the constitution ceases to be supreme; the syndicate does.

Thecitizens who fund policing through taxes are left paying again for private security because public security has been captured.

Institutions that should restore integrity have become complicit in its erosion. The Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID) once the conscience of policing now epitomizes inertia.

Its long-running “blue-lights” corruption case against former police commissioner Khomotso Phahlane has dragged since 2019, with the Specialised Commercial Crime Court in 2025 labelling the state’s delays “unreasonable.”

The “Nasrec grabber” case, where former national commissioner Khehla Sitole and deputies obstructed IPID’s probe into a R45 million surveillance device procurement, exposed outright defiance by police leadership. In the “Zimbabwe renditions” saga, IPID investigators were sidelined and their leadership suspended for probing politically sensitive deportations.

In 2022/23 IPID referred 2 093 cases to the NPA; 684 were declined, 9 withdrawn and 1 347 stillpending. Such numbers don’t represent a backlog, they represent a collapsing system.

The watchdog barks for form, not function. Recent testimony by Adv. Andrea Johnson, head of the Investigating Directorate for Anti-Corruption (IDAC), confirms the institutional anaemia. IDAC, she revealed, has only 128 staff, no intelligence-gathering arm, and relies entirely on referrals and subpoenas, hardly the arsenal needed to fight a cartelized state.

She candidly noted the disappearance of 121 dockets after the disbandment of the KZN Political Killings Task Team and warned against labelling investigators “rogue.”

The message is sobering: the new anti-corruption architecture is bureaucratically cautious, procedurally polite, and operationally toothless. From Marikana to Phala Phala, commissions have replaced convictions. Every scandal births an inquiry; every inquiry fades into redacted recommendations and “ongoing investigations.” The result is a nation where law is ceremonial and accountability theatrical.

The Commission has become South Africa’s national religion, having faith without repentance, ritual without reform. Each hearing absorbs outrage, resets the narrative, and extends impunity. This is how moral insolvency manifests itself, not as sudden collapse but as daily habituation to scandal. Citizens no longer expect justice; they expect delay. The state survives not by delivering governance, but by outsourcing the performance of it.

Policing, once a core government function, is now privatised for elite capture. When EMPD fleets moonlight for cable syndicates and hospitals double as money-laundering fronts, the social contract ruptures. The executive blames the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy blames capacity, and the citizen learns to survive outside the law’s protection. Like Medellín under Escobar, South Africa risks becoming a state where crime subsidises order and impunity masquerades as governance.

The Madlanga Commission revealed as much when General Khumalo testified that the “Big Five” cartel operateswithin police intelligence, with politicians as shareholders of protection rackets. If the enforcers of law are participants in crime, the Republic of Commissions is already a cartel republic.

South Africa’s redemption lies in three imperatives:

Reclaim enforcement: Metropolitan police must return under transparent civilian control. Any overlap with private security must be outlawed.

Rebuild oversight: IPID and IDAC need structural independence, forensic capability, and timelines bound by statute.

Revive prosecution: The NPA must be judged by outcomes, not announcements; each deferred case is a betrayal of the rule of law.

We have moved from a state that failed to deliver to one that delivers failure profitably. Tembisa Hospital is our Medellín, EMPD our Antioquia, and the blue-lights cartel our new political economy. The Republic of Commissions is not a metaphor it is the lived reality of a nation where justice is subcontracted and morality has no line item in the budget.

Unless citizens reclaim the institutions meant to serve them, the cartel will remain the government and democracy will become its front company.