For a 59-year-old man who spent his career rising through the ranks of South Africa’s police service, the end came not in a courtroom but in a disciplinary hearing room, where a lawyer handed in his resignation letter on Monday. Lieutenant General Shadrack Sibiya, the country’s deputy police chief, walked away from the force three weeks after being charged with sexual offences. He did so while still in custody, having been arrested three weeks earlier.
The charges against him are grave. He is accused of sexually grooming a 16-year-old girl and raping an 18-year-old woman, and he also faces a charge of human trafficking. He denies the grooming and rape allegations. On the rape charge, he acknowledges that he had sex with the 18-year-old woman but says it was consensual. Beyond the criminal case, he is separately accused of having links to organised crime bosses, allegations that led to his suspension last year and which he also denies.
For the police service itself, the departure carries a formal sting. Police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said in a post on X that Sibiya’s resignation is regarded as a dishonourable discharge, because he left the force while still facing a disciplinary case. In other words, the man who served as deputy national police chief does not leave with his record intact, but under the service’s most damaging form of exit.
The allegations that shadowed his final years in uniform first surfaced in public at the Madlanga Commission, a major inquiry into police corruption and collusion with criminals that has transfixed South Africa over the past year. It was there that accusations emerged that Sibiya was linked to crime bosses. He was accused of interfering with investigations into political killings in KwaZulu-Natal province, and of receiving a gift of cash as well as 20 impalas from an alleged criminal kingpin in exchange for a police contract. He denied that allegation.
The commission itself owes its existence to an extraordinary moment of open conflict within the police hierarchy. President Cyril Ramaphosa set it up after the KwaZulu-Natal police chief held a press briefing in which he accused the then Police Minister, Senzo Mchunu, of working with criminal gangs. Mchunu denies the allegations against him, but he has been suspended. What began as one provincial commissioner’s public accusation has since grown into an inquiry that has unearthed widespread allegations of links between police officers and crime bosses, shaking public trust in the institutions meant to protect ordinary South Africans.
For the communities watching these proceedings, the stakes are personal. The commission’s hearings have laid bare claims that the officers tasked with fighting organised crime may instead have been entangled with it, and the sight of the deputy national police chief resigning under a cloud, from custody, will do little to reassure those who depend on the police for their safety. Sibiya’s departure removes one senior figure. Meanwhile, the questions raised at the inquiry about how far criminal influence reaches into the service remain unanswered.
His resignation letter, submitted at his disciplinary hearing on Monday by his lawyer, closes one chapter in a saga that has run for more than a year. The criminal charges he faces, the human trafficking count among them, will now proceed without him holding office. Whether the wider reckoning demanded by the Madlanga Commission’s findings follows is the question that many South Africans will be asking as the inquiry continues. Further coverage of the case and its context can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8wy9d940pyko.