The Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department – responsible for traffic policing, crime prevention, and by-law enforcement in South Africa’s capital city – has not escaped this crisis.

With over four million residents spread across 6,298 square kilometres, Tshwane plays a vital role in the country’s political and economic landscape. Yet its municipal police department, one of the largest in South Africa, with an average of 4,000 operational staff, is increasingly associated with allegations of bribery, abuse of power and unethical behaviour.

I am a postdoctoral researcher with a focus on criminal justice, and an active social justice advocate. In a recent research paper, I explored how corruption in the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department is damaging public trust and compromising law enforcement and crime prevention.

I was able to observe the culture and environment of the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department as a motorist and as an employee under the city’s Community and Social Development Department.

My research drew on texts and context rather than analysis of numbers, since the study was written after I left the City of Tshwane. I relied on my first hand experience, and already published and documented evidence. I did not need special permissions to do this but cited sources consulted.

The study found that motorists view the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department as predators rather than protectors. Corruption in the traffic police is more than a betrayal of public trust. When officers take bribes instead of enforcing traffic laws, road safety suffers.

Inside the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department

In recent years, the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department has been accused of recruiting members with criminal records and cases of corruption.

My key findings were about:

Hiring practices: Individuals with criminal records have been recruited into the department. Vetting is conducted, but the reports come later when they are already employed, then they are expelled.

Bribery: Motorists frequently report officers soliciting bribes during routine traffic stops or other bribery related incidences. Some of these reports are made to the mayoral committee member for community safety.

Lack of accountability: Officers implicated in corruption are not always dismissed, or may face minimal consequences.

Public complaints: Over 200 officers have been under investigation for various misconduct allegations in recent years.

Political interference and leadership instability

In the course of the research, I found that another key factor undermining the effectiveness of the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department is political interference in operational matters and leadership appointments as a result of the structure of the municipalities across the country. All mayoral committee executives and council members are politicians.

Frequent reshuffling of senior leaders based on politics rather than merit weakens strategic direction and fosters corruption. Politically connected individuals often secure positions without proper vetting, either due to delays in completing reports or human resources not waiting for the report before proceeding with appointments.

The combination of weak vetting processes, inadequate oversight, and political interference has created an environment where corruption is not only possible but, in some cases, normalised.

Damage to the capital city’s global reputation and tourism

The corruption within the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department not only affects local residents but also tarnishes Pretoria’s reputation as South Africa’s administrative capital, home to embassies from around the world.

As the city hosts more than 130 foreign diplomatic missions — the second-largest concentration of embassies in the world after Washington DC — the behaviour of municipal police officers directly influences the capital city’s global image.

When officers solicit bribes or abuse their power during routine traffic stops, they might not distinguish between local residents, foreign diplomats or tourists. This indiscriminate targeting is likely to create an unsafe environment for international visitors and damage the trust of foreign nations engaging with South Africa.

What needs to be done

Addressing corruption in the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department will require urgent reforms. Based on the research, I argue that the following actions are essential:

Stricter recruitment processes: Background checks should be mandatory for all officers. Individuals found to have criminal records should be disqualified from serving.

Body cameras and digital monitoring: Equipping officers with body cameras would provide an objective record of interactions with the public.

Independent oversight: An external body should be established to investigate complaints and ensure accountability. Currently, municipal policing is governed by the South African Police Service Act 68 of 1995, and the Independent Police Investigative Directorate investigates some complaints. But it appears to have limited resources.

Ethics training: All officers should get regular training to reinforce the importance of integrity and professionalism. They are currently trained at the Police Academy and get support from academic institutions, including the University of Pretoria.

Community engagement: Building partnerships between the Tshwane Metropolitan Police Department and the communities it serves can help restore trust and improve transparency.

Municipal policing law

Restoring public confidence requires more than piecemeal reforms — it demands a new legal framework.

A South African Municipal Policing Act could create a unified standard for municipal policing across the country, addressing many of the root causes of corruption. This legislation could introduce:

National municipal police officers register: A centralised database that records applications, criminal background checks, disciplinary history, and performance assessments of all municipal officers.

Uniform ethical standards: Clear ethical guidelines that apply to all municipal police officers, regardless of location.

Independent oversight: An investigative body focused solely on municipal policing.

Mandatory pre-vetting process: All applicants would undergo fingerprint-based criminal record checks.

Cross-municipal blacklisting: Officers dismissed or suspended from one municipality would be automatically barred from working in another.

Digital recording systems: All municipal police vehicles and personnel would be equipped with body cameras and GPS tracking systems to improve accountability.

A framework like this would close loopholes that allow corrupt officers to move between municipalities undetected. It would also prevent the recycling of officers with criminal records.

Written by Azwihangwisi Judith Mphidi, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Tshwane University of Technology.

Republished with permission from The Conversation. The original article can be found here.

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At the back of a field in a north Tshwane township, Siphiwe* sits on a red plastic chair, chewing a matchstick. Two small trees stand on either side of him, holding up shade cloth. Below him, men sit on the grass, needles hanging from their necks.

Siphiwe tells GroundUp that he has been selling drugs since he was ten. At first he sold weed, but the 25-year-old primarily deals nyaope (heroin) these days. He buys it from Nigerian suppliers in Pretoria for R21 a bag and sells it to his customers for R30. People typically inject about three to six of these doses a day.

Heroin/nyaope has been popular in Tshwane’s northern townships for over 20 years. But Siphiwe says a new product has taken hold in recent years – crystal meth.

In the Western Cape, meth has been one of the most popular illicit drugs since at least the mid-2000s, where it’s known as tik. It became popular in the Eastern Cape from about 2010. But in north Tshwane townships, such as Ga-Rankuwa, Winterveld, Mabopane and Soshanguve, the widespread emergence of meth is more recent.

Dealers and users in the region told GroundUp that the drug (known locally as crystal) hit the streets around 2019. Its popularity quickly surged, noticed by health workers from 2022.

Siphiwe and his partners buy rocks of meth, roughly the size of fists, from Tanzanian suppliers based in Pretoria. He then crushes these up and repackages them in small see-through baggies. Packs go for R50, R30 and even R10. The tiny R10 dose provides a single shot.

Most people who use drugs in northern Tshwane told GroundUp that rather than smoking crystal from a glass pipe, they usually dissolve it in water, and then inject it. In some cases, people combine nyaope and crystal in a single shot, known as “motswako” (Sesotho for a mixture) or a “bomb” (also the name used in cities like Durban).

Crystal fuelled days of sleepless hustling

Tshepo is one of the customers who sits needle in neck on the grass next to Siphiwe. GroundUp had spoken to him earlier that day at a scrap yard, where he sat peeling copper from a small pipe. He and his friend, Mpho, told GroundUp that they have been using nyaope since about 2013.

To finance this, they spend their days at dumping sites, collecting and selling scrap.

“We pick up all those things that are recyclable,” says Mpho. “We start in the morning from seven o’clock, and we [finish] at around 11. After that, I go again from 12 o’clock to three o’clock … During the day I recycle maybe three times.”

With each round of scrap collection, Tshepo and Mpho earn a bit of cash to buy nyaope from Siphiwe, a few hundred metres from the scrapyard. But the cycle requires a continuous hustle; heroin withdrawal can occur within hours of the last hit. Taking a day out isn’t an option.

The lifestyle leaves users exhausted. But crystal offers an “antidote”. While nyaope is a “downer”, meth is a stimulant, says Mpho, and can keep a person energised and able to continue working. It’s one of the reasons that he has been using the drug regularly since 2022.

It’s a common trajectory. GroundUp spoke to numerous people who use drugs in northern Tshwane. Most have been taking nyaope for ten to 20 years, only adding crystal meth to their daily drug diet sometime in the 2020s. The drug allows them to stay awake and alert, they say, but it can also cause more pernicious effects.

Meth-induced psychosis – “tormenting spirits”

Psychosis, in which people can’t distinguish between events that are real and those that aren’t, has been one of the most concerning impacts of northern Tshwane’s crystal meth explosion, according to clinical staff at the Community Oriented Substance Use Program (COSUP). This is a harm reduction organisation which helps people who use drugs across Tshwane.

“Sometimes the psychosis is acute, and after some [time] it gets resolved,” says Bongeka Dyantyi, a clinical associate at COSUP, “but other people go through psychosis and just never come back”.

At the scrapyard, Mpho explains that crystal “can show you some things which are not happening”.

“When I see a person walk by, maybe he looks at me, I will think that he’s talking about me. Maybe he wants to come and beat me, but that person is just walking,” he says.

Clinical staff at a COSUP centre in Soshanguve, Block V, say that from about 2021 they began seeing an increasing number of clients exhibiting strange behaviour. Only later did they realise this was linked to a growing meth problem.

Yvonne Mashego, a social worker at the site, says, “Sometimes a client would come here running, showing signs of psychosis. They’ll be hallucinating; they’ll be [talking about] things that are not there”.

In the predominantly coloured township of Eersterust, near Pretoria, 50 kilometers south of Soshanguve, a former crystal meth user, explains what these hallucinations can feel like: “You don’t sleep. You’re overthinking … You start hearing voices”. He says people often refer to these voices as “tormenting spirits”.

“Why I [call it] tormenting spirits is because that spirit is using someone else’s voice – that voice is maybe my mom’s voice. Now, I hear my mom: ‘Someone is in the house, go there.’ Or I hear his voice,” he pointed to his friend. “When I come out of my home, I’m angry with him ‘cos that spirit was tormenting me with his voice.”

In Eersterust, meth has been popular for longer than in the north, for roughly ten years, according to users. The cheapest meth dose appears to be R30, rather than R10. Here too, clinical staff at the Eersterust COSUP clinic told GroundUp that meth-induced psychosis has been one of their most pressing challenges. Hearing voices is a common manifestation. Uncontrolled aggression is another.

Where is South Africa’s meth coming from?

Historically, much of South Africa’s crystal meth was manufactured locally: Western Cape gangs would get the chemical precursors used to make meth from Chinese syndicates. In return the gangs provided poached abalone – a delicacy in Hong Kong.

A report by the Global Initiative found that imported meth has supplied a larger share of the market over time. Suppliers include Nigeria, where industrial meth labs began blossoming in around 2016, as well as Afghanistan, which began to supply meth to South Africa from about 2019.

GroundUp spoke to several active and former meth dealers in northern Tshwane. A prominent dealer told GroundUp that he is personally aware of a rural plot in Randfontein (in the West Rand) where a criminal group cooks both crystal meth and methcathinone, commonly known as cat. Cooking meth in urban settings isn’t typically viable, he says, due to the potent smell.

Three days after this interview took place, police published a statement saying that they had busted a meth lab in Rietfontein, which is also in the West Rand, roughly 25km from Randfontein.

Mexican groupings appear to be playing a role in local manufacturing operations. In the Rietfontein bust, a Mexican national was apprehended. Two Mexican nationals were also arrested in a separate incident in July last year, when police raided a meth lab in Limpopo. In Nigeria, the industrial meth labs that emerged from 2016 were allegedly developed in collaboration with a Mexican cartel.

The rise of the Forum

Most dealers in northern Tshwane told GroundUp that they buy meth from Nigerian or Tanzanian suppliers in the central Pretoria suburb of Sunnyside, before driving it back up north. In some cases, suppliers deliver it to them directly, or meet them halfway.

One told GroundUp that he would typically buy about ten grams worth of meth in Sunnyside for R800, and then sell it in the north for about R3,800.

In the last year, a new heavily armed gang, known as the Forum, has been changing these arrangements in at least one township.

The dealer explained: “These guys [the Forum], they come to you if they know that you are selling [crystal or nyaope]. They say, ‘Stop stocking from the Nigerians, we’re going to bring it to you.’”

The Forum now buys from the Nigerian groups, and local dealers are forced to buy from them.

Sitting next to the dealer, an associate says, “If they come to you and they find you are [directly] stocking from the Nigerians, that will be a huge problem. They don’t play; they kill you.”

This article was republished with permission from GroundUp, the original article can be found here.

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This comes after the Tshwane Metro and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) agreed on Friday to co-operate on solving the issue of illegal occupations within the city. It is expected that a formal cooperative agreement will be entered into soon.

The FF Plus has discussed how to address several pressing problems with the DHA, including illegal land occupation, crime, the sale of counterfeit goods, cable theft, illegal electricity connections and extortion.

One of the most pressing concerns is foreign nationals illegally occupying abandoned buildings in the Pretoria CBD, where it is alleged, they rent rooms to other undocumented foreigners. Due to the conditions of these buildings, the City views it as a health, fire and safety risk.

Theunissen announced that there is suspicion of syndicates corroborating with City officials, law firms and the Deeds Office to transfer properties to criminals’ names.

Large quantities of counterfeit goods are allegedly sold in Pretoria West, where many Somali nationals live. Drug trafficking is “the order of the day in Sunnyside” according to Theunissen, who notes the area is home to many Nigerian nationals.

Further, Theunissen notes Centurion and Pretoria East, where Zimbabweans and Mozambicans are concentrated respectively, are particularly affected by cable theft and infrastructure vandalism.

In addition to helping with immigration control, the Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Leon Schreiber was also asked to assist with immediate deportation, more stringent border control and investigating corruption at South African borders.

The FF Plus is of the opinion that other departments should also be involved to curb the problem effectively.

“The illegal hijacking of buildings in Tshwane must be stopped, so, the FF Plus is committed to eradicating the problem and the crime that goes hand in hand with it,” the party said in a statement.

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The suspects were apprehended by multidisciplinary teams of personnel from different law enforcement agencies that were tasked to patrol and safeguard the capital city. Operations were carried out in cooperation with departments such as Home Affairs, Gauteng Traffic, local law enforcement, including the Tshwane Metro Police Department, and Community Policing Forums. Officers from different SAPS stations also played crucial roles.

The activities included patrols in high-crime areas, compliance inspections, and crackdowns on illegal alcohol sales, the SAPS said.

By the end of the weekend, 243 individuals were arrested for offenses such as assault, housebreaking, public drinking, driving under the influence, and armed robbery, as part of routine police actions across Tshwane.

In the Wierdabrug and Olievenhoutbosch areas, Operation Shanela saw Tshwane Detective teams arrest 228 suspects, including those involved in serious crimes such as murder, assault, rape, and gender-based violence.

Three reaction groups of officers were deployed and tasked with patrolling and enforcing the law in the Wierdabrug and Olievenhoutbosch areas. Five liquor premises were inspected, resulting in the closure of four premises and the confiscation of 308 750 ml bottles of illicit liquor for violating the Liquor Act with three crystal meth ziplock bags found abandoned.

Additionally, 52 undocumented persons were detained for deportation, and 1 person was arrested for employing illegal immigrants.

With this operation, 612 individuals and 345 vehicles were inspected and searched, with five vehicles tested to determine if they had been stolen. Seven premises were also searched, leading to the arrest of 17 individuals for drunk driving, and five persons for drinking in public. One person was arrested and charged for the possession of illicit cigarettes when 350 cartons of cigarettes were found in his possession.

While stop and search actions were executed in Olievenhoutbosch, a grey Audi with seven occupants was stopped and searched. An unlicensed firearm that was reported stolen in a house robbery in 2021 in Olievenhoutbosch was discovered in the vehicle. The firearm be sent for ballistic tests to determine whether the suspects and the firearm could be linked to other criminal activities.

In another incident, on 20 July, members of the Tshwane District Stabilization Team were on duty performing crime prevention patrols on the R566 road in Akasia when a suspicious white VW Polo was seen driving in the direction of Ga-Rankuwa. The police attempted to stop and search the vehicle. However, the vehicle did not stop, resulting in a high-speed chase.

The chase concluded in the Mmakau area where the driver lost control and hit a wall. The driver was apprehended, and upon searching the vehicle, 25 kg of dagga with a street value of approximately R20 000 was found. The suspect was arrested for possession and dealing in dagga and detained.

While patrolling the Mabopane area, police found a white Toyota Land Cruiser abandoned on the road. Preliminary investigations revealed that the vehicle had been reported stolen in Garsfontein in July 2024. The vehicle was seized, and investigations will be conducted to trace and return it to its rightful owner.

Continuing with their successes, members of the Online Intervention Team received information about a truck hijacking incident on the N1 highway. Using the information and coordinates provided, the team recovered the abandoned truck with the keys still inside.

In addition, 49 Aarto traffic infringement notices were issued, amounting to R27 250.

Brigadier Samuel Thine, the Acting District Commissioner of Tshwane, extended his gratitude to all role-players and personnel for their commitment.

On 14 May, previous Police Minister Bheki Cele deployed the Stabilisation Team to Tshwane after the murder of a 5-year-old boy during the hijacking of his father’s vehicle in Shoshanguve. The Tshwane Stabilisation Team intends to reduce instances of road spikings, robbery, drugs, hijackings and vehicle theft.

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