SAPS Paid R115.5m to 767 Criminally Charged Officers in 17 Months

Every month for 17 months, about R6.8 million left the police payroll and landed in the bank accounts of officers who had been criminally charged.

The total is exact to the cent: R115,565,584.49, paid to 767 members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) between 1 April 2025 and 31 August 2026. That is an average of roughly R150,000 each.

The figure comes from the acting police minister himself. Firoz Cachalia set it out in a written reply to MK Party MP Vusi Shongwe, whose question covered officers charged, disciplined, suspended and dismissed over criminal activity.

It arrives while a judicial commission is hearing evidence on whether criminal syndicates have bought their way into the police. The reply shows what happens to an officer after the charge sheet is drawn up. In most cases, very little changes.

On the payroll, on the beat

Paying a charged officer is not in itself a scandal. A charge is not a conviction, and every one of these members is innocent until a court finds otherwise. The harder question is where they spend their working day while the case runs.

On that, the numbers are stark. Internal discipline under the 2016 SAPS regulations caught up with 629 members, yet precautionary suspension was used in only 60 cases. Another 427 kept their posts and their pay while their hearings were still pending.

That is two in every three officers facing discipline still at work: taking statements, handling dockets, carrying a service pistol.

Dismissal followed for just 36, and a further 19 left the service before a hearing could begin. An officer who resigns ahead of a hearing leaves without a disciplinary finding.

The charges that are missing

The reply separates out one group. Across the 2025/26 financial year and the first quarter of 2026/27, the offences Shongwe asked about produced charges against 177 officers: 118 for corruption and 59 for defeating the ends of justice.

What is absent matters more. Organised crime, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and the protection of syndicates yielded no charges against any SAPS member in the period, by Cachalia's account.

Set that against the past year. The Madlanga Commission and a parliamentary ad hoc committee were both set up in 2025 to examine claims that drug cartels had infiltrated the police. Major-General Lesetja Senona, who headed the Hawks in KwaZulu-Natal, quit in June 2026 while accused of leaking a confidential police document and of involvement in the theft of 541kg of cocaine. Those remain allegations.

Either the infiltration described in testimony is smaller than the country has been told, or the cases have not yet reached a charge sheet.

Convictions in the period came to 43, of which 32 were for corruption and 11 for defeating the ends of justice.

What the pattern says

This is not a new problem. Institute for Security Studies research covering April 2022 to March 2025 counted 37 SAPS members convicted of corruption after police watchdog investigations, and only 17 of them, or 46%, lost their jobs. More than half of the officers a court had convicted of corruption were not dismissed.

The watchdog itself, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID), is stretched. Its 2025/26 caseload ran to 5,259 registered complaints of police misconduct, against 84 convictions secured in the year.

Cachalia has not disputed the scale. In May he conceded the service was affected by "systemic corruption", while insisting that those responsible were being held to account.

His reply lists the tools SAPS says it uses: lifestyle reviews, investigations and audits meant to surface unexplained wealth, conflicts of interest and fraud. Under what the service calls its "Reset Agenda", every lieutenant-general has been re-vetted, with major-generals and lower ranks due to follow in phases.

The question nobody answered

The reply does not say how many of the 427 officers still on duty face charges that touch the work they do every day. It does not say who decides that an officer accused of corruption may keep handling dockets, or on what test.

Until SAPS answers that, a member of the public walking into a charge office has no means of knowing which kind of officer is behind the counter.