[4] As a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Border regional command, he was arrested in June 1963 and sentenced in February 1964 to fifteen years in jail for belonging to a banned organization.
[4] He spent his prison time on Robben Island and completed a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in English and Philosophy from University of South Africa (UNISA).
[4][2] He became a political commissar in MK in August 1987 and authorized the ANC military units in South Africa to attack white civilians by means of a bombing campaign of restaurants and nightclubs in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban.
[5] During the 1987, Tshwete was involved in the talks, in Dakar, Senegal and Paris, France when white businessmen, Afrikaner intellectuals and leading South African opposition members met the ANC for discussions.
He had the knack of "bringing sworn enemies to the negotiating table and sending them away as allies ... he went from one sporting code to the next and fixed the potholes on their roads to unity".
He was tasked with restoring the morale of an undermanned, underpaid police force beset with a political history of maintaining apartheid, riddled with corruption and a huge escalation of violent crime in the country.
[2] On 24 April 2001, Tshwete, in his capacity of Minister of Safety and Security, announced, on national television, an investigation into an alleged plot to oust the country's president, Thabo Mbeki, by three high-ranking members of the ANC.
[9] The opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, described the investigation as an abuse of government powers and a method to neutralize opponents as Mbeki sought a second term as president.