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LEN KALANE

As South Africa’s most consequential commission of inquiry in a generation took a break for about a fortnight before its final, decisive stretch, a look back at who has already fallen, who is teetering, who should be losing sleep — and the recommendation nobody has as yet written about.

172 days of testimony as of the break

18+ SAPS officials suspended in the fallout

16 Nov final report due to the President

It has been called, without much exaggeration, the commission that could not stop watching itself be watched.

Fourteen months after KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi walked to a lectern in Durban and detonated a claim that would consume the country’s police, prosecution and political class, the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System — universally shortened to the Madlanga Commission after its chair, retired Constitutional Court justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga — has gone into recess.

The commission sat through its 172nd day of hearings on 2 September before standing down for a scheduled break, with hearings due to resume in mid-September — the commission’s own spokesperson named 14 September, though chair Justice Madlanga’s own announcement pointed to 15 September — public evidence now scheduled to close on 2 October and a final report due to President Cyril Ramaphosa on 16 November.

That is the bureaucratic version of events. The human version is messier: a police service missing a permanent national commissioner, a deputy national commissioner facing possible criminal charges, a whistle-blower gunned down in front of his family, and a KwaZulu-Natal provincial commissioner who, thirteen months on, can plausibly claim to have been right about most of it.

Before the commission returns to finish the job, it is worth taking stock of exactly what its 172 days have produced — and of the one witness, in its final session before the break, who quietly started sketching what its recommendations might actually look like.

1. Already brought down — the confirmed casualties

Some heads have already rolled, formally and finally. This is the list of people whose careers the commission’s evidence has already ended, either through dismissal, resignation, or suspension that has effectively removed them from office for the duration.

• Major-General Richard Shibiri — the SAPS head of organised crime, suspended since February 2026, was formally dismissed on 5 June following internal disciplinary proceedings that traced back to commission evidence about the awarding of the R360-million Medicare24 tender to businessman Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala.
• Advocate Andrea Johnson — the former head of the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (IDAC) vacated her post with immediate effect in August, after President Ramaphosa waived her notice period, following weeks of damaging testimony about an intricate web linking her, suspended Crime Intelligence boss Feroz Khan and suspended chief investigator Dylan Perumal.

CAPTION: ANDREA JOHNSON

• Major-General Lesetja Senona — the KwaZulu-Natal Hawks head resigned in July, before disciplinary action could be taken, after allegations before the commission about the theft of roughly R200-million worth of drugs from the Hawks’ Port Shepstone offices. He was named in the commission’s first interim report; he has said publicly that “some people were out to get him.”
• Brigadier Rachel Matjeng — dismissed following an internal disciplinary process that found her guilty of misconduct linked to the Medicare24 scandal.
• Nine members of the SAPS bid evaluation committee that awarded Matlala’s company the Medicare24 contract were placed on suspension in June pending disciplinary proceedings.

“The commission’s work has revealed serious criminal conduct at the police senior leadership level, leading to the arrest and suspension of more than a dozen generals and leaving critical units led by acting officials.”  — Lizette Lancaster, Institute for Security Studies

Standing above all of them, in seniority if not in the granularity of the allegations against him, are two suspensions that reshaped the top of South African law enforcement before the commission had even finished its first phase: national police commissioner General Fannie Masemola and his deputy for crime detection, Lieutenant-General Shadrack Sibiya, both suspended, alongside then-police minister Senzo Mchunu, whose suspension came a day after the commission was announced in July 2025 and who remains out of office more than a year later. Crime Intelligence’s Feroz Khan and Gauteng Hawks head Ebrahim Kadwa were arrested in May on unrelated but adjacent charges of dealing in precious metals — men whose names had already been read into the commission’s record.

2. Futures hanging by a thread

A tier below the confirmed casualties sits a group whose fate now rests on processes the commission itself set in motion — referrals for disciplinary hearings and criminal investigation that have been accepted by the Presidency but have not yet run their course.

The clearest marker of this is the commission’s second interim report, handed to President Ramaphosa on 29 May and publicly detailed in August. It recommended the institution of disciplinary proceedings, immediate criminal investigation, and — should sufficient evidence emerge — criminal prosecution, against four people: Lieutenant-General Shadrack Sibiya, the protected witness known only as Witness G, Sergeant Fannie Nkosi, and North West businessman and self-described political fixer Brown Mogotsi.

CAPTION: SUSPENDED LT-GEN SHADRACK SIBIYA

Sibiya’s position is the most politically loaded of the four. He has always denied Mkhwanazi’s central charge — that he colluded with Mchunu to disband the Political Killings Task Team and shielded organised-crime figures — and the commission itself confirmed in May that it does not intend to recall him for further oral evidence, effectively closing his opportunity to answer new allegations from the stand. What remains is the referral: disciplinary proceedings and a possible criminal case, still working their way through the system as the commission enters its final stretch.

Sergeant Fannie Nkosi, for his part, gave his own explosive evidence from the dock in March, describing himself as a go-between who ferried messages, documents and a live-animal “gift” of impalas between Sibiya and Matlala, while denying he personally handled bribe money. It was Matlala himself, testifying later in August, who went further — telling the commission that Sibiya was “collecting money” from people in Gauteng and naming Nkosi, not himself, as the conduit.

Nkosi has not been able to answer that claim from the stand: he was arrested and suspended in late March, after his testimony, when police searching his properties found explosives, unlicensed firearms, ammunition, R50,000 in cash and dockets tied to unrelated cash-in-transit and hijacking cases. He was refused bail and remains in custody — a casualty in his own right, whatever the commission ultimately makes of his account of Sibiya.

Lieutenant-General Dumisani Khumalo, the Crime Intelligence head who first named the alleged “Big Five” cartel in testimony as far back as September 2025, no longer faces prosecution at all. The case against him and six co-accused, built around a contested Crime Intelligence appointment, was provisionally withdrawn by the NPA on 27 July after National Director of Public Prosecutions Advocate Andy Mothibi opened a review of whether IDAC had acted within its legal mandate on several high-profile cases, then withdrawn unconditionally on 21 August, with the state telling the court all charges against all seven accused were being dropped.

IDAC state advocate Drushantha Ramsamy testified that the suspects had effectively been settled on by the directorate’s own leadership before the case was built around them, and lead investigator Colonel Brian Padayachee — who had told the commission in July that the charges were solidly evidence-based and untouched by political interference — was himself suspended pending a disciplinary process on 30 July. It is the clearest instance yet of a case from Andrea Johnson’s IDAC coming apart under scrutiny, and it directly undercuts the version Padayachee gave the commission only weeks earlier.

Masemola’s own case has since followed a similar arc, though not yet to the same conclusion. His legal team submitted representations to the NPA in August asking that his Public Finance Management Act charges over the Medicare24 tender be withdrawn, arguing the case suffers from the same defects the review found in Khumalo’s. Mothibi has confirmed Masemola’s matter is among the IDAC cases being reassessed, and a decision is expected when the case returns to the Pretoria Magistrates’ Court on 29 September. Masemola’s lawyer has said he is hopeful the charges will be dropped and that President Ramaphosa would then move quickly to lift his suspension. Nothing has yet been decided, but the Khumalo outcome means Masemola’s suspension can no longer be read as a settled part of the commission’s confirmed toll — it is, instead, an open question that the review process could resolve either way.

Feroz Khan and Ebrahim Kadwa, already arrested in May, still face the slower-moving machinery of prosecution. Godfrey Lebeya, the former Hawks national head, has at least finished giving his account: he completed his testimony on 2 September, denying under sustained questioning that he knew any of the men allegedly linked to the Big Five cartel, defending his decision to send Hawks officers into a 2024 operation targeting alleged cartel figure Katiso “KT” Molefe, and closing with a statement declaring himself incorruptible. Evidence leaders called parts of his account hard to credit; the commission is not expected to recall him, so the final report will be working from that record rather than from any further testimony of his.

3. Sleepless nights — waiting for the knock

A third category is harder to pin down precisely because it is defined by exposure rather than action: people named, implicated or circled in testimony, whose position has not yet formally changed, but whose names now sit inside a file the commission has flagged for further investigation.

CAPTION: CAT MATLALA – COURTESY MAIL&GUARDIAN

• Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala — the businessman at the centre of the Medicare24 tender scandal has repeatedly invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination when questioned on key details, while acknowledging relationships with senior police figures and denying others, including with Mchunu and Khan.
• A cluster of nine officials from the Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg metropolitan municipalities were named in the commission’s first interim report alongside Senona and Matjeng, with the commission finding prima facie evidence warranting immediate criminal investigation — most have not yet faced public consequences.
• North West businessman Suleiman Carrim, one of the apparent funders behind Matlala’s Medicare24 bid, has already testified — in March and again in August 2026 — but not to any settled outcome. He told the commission he was “played” by Matlala and fixer Brown Mogotsi out of more than R8-million, was then accused by evidence leaders of concealing over R2-million in additional payments, and has since given an account of the size of his loan that contradicts Matlala’s own. Evidence leaders have raised the possibility of a money-laundering charge, but none has yet been brought.
• Suspended EMPD deputy chief Brigadier Julius Mkhwanazi has gone from implicated to charged, several times over. He was arrested in August 2026 over the 2022 torture and murder of robbery suspect Emmanuel Mbense — the killing Witness D’s testimony first exposed — and is now among six accused fighting a Schedule 6 bail application.

He separately faces trial over the alleged 2023 theft of some R14.9-million in precious stones from a Killarney, Johannesburg property, a case alongside two former EMPD officers that was postponed to 18 September; and he is a co-accused, alongside former Ekurhuleni municipal manager Imogen Mashazi, in a “blue lights” fraud and corruption case arising from claims he unlawfully supplied police-style lights to Matlala. Two officials who allegedly shielded him from discipline in that case, former legal head Advocate Kemi Behari and former HR head Linda Gxasheka, were themselves dismissed by the City of Ekurhuleni in July.

That last case is a reminder that this commission’s stakes are not abstract. In December 2025, Marius “Vlam” van der Merwe — known publicly only as Witness D — was shot dead outside his Brakpan home in front of his wife and children, weeks after testifying about the killing of Emmanuel Mbense, a robbery suspect allegedly tortured to death by police and EMPD officers in April 2022, his body later dumped in a dam near Duduza. Van der Merwe had himself been warned he could face charges over Mbense’s death before he was shot.

President Ramaphosa condemned the killing as retaliation for “courageous testimony” that had “angered elements seeking to undermine the rule of law.” No one has yet been convicted for Van der Merwe’s own murder, though a suspect is before the courts: Matipandile Sotheni, a former member of the SAPS Special Task Force who left the service in 2019, was arrested in March 2026 and charged as the alleged gunman, a case still working through bail and pre-trial proceedings. The Task Force detail carries its own charge, since KwaZulu-Natal commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi — the man whose July 2025 briefing set all of this in motion, and no relation to EMPD’s Julius Mkhwanazi — is himself a former commander of that same elite unit, meaning the accused would have served, at some point, under him. Julius Mkhwanazi and five co-accused are separately fighting bail in the underlying Mbense murder case. It is the starkest possible illustration of why some witnesses have since testified in camera, and why the commission has been forced repeatedly to weigh public transparency against the physical safety of the people helping it do its work.

CAPTION: LT-GEN MKHWANAZI – COURTESY MAIL&GUARDIAN

4. The Mkhwanazi scorecard — how July 6 has held up

It is now more than a year since Mkhwanazi’s press briefing in Durban, and the honest answer to “was he right” is: mostly, though not uniformly, and not without cost to himself. His central claims — that senior police officials had entangled themselves with organised-crime figures, that investigations into politically sensitive killings had been deliberately obstructed, and that a small network of “fixers” moved between police generals, cartel bosses and politicians — have been substantially corroborated by eighteen months of testimony, suspensions and the commission’s own interim findings.

“The commission has vindicated Mkhwanazi by showing his allegations deserve serious investigation. However, the real test is still to come. The commission will only be judged a success if its findings lead to prosecutions, institutional reform, real accountability — and not just another report as we have seen with previous commissions.”  — Rene Oosthuizen, political analyst

The Sibiya referral in the second interim report is the single clearest piece of documentary vindication: a formal finding, accepted by the Presidency, that the deputy national commissioner Mkhwanazi named as his chief internal antagonist should face criminal investigation. But vindication has not been total, and some of it has proven temporary. Padayachee’s July testimony defending the Khumalo prosecution was overtaken within weeks: the NPA withdrew that case unconditionally in August, Padayachee was himself suspended pending discipline, and a colleague’s evidence suggested the prosecution had been built around suspects chosen in advance. The same review is now being invoked by Masemola’s lawyers to argue that his own charges should collapse too — which, if it succeeds, would trim rather than confirm the tally of casualties often cited as proof Mkhwanazi was right. Sibiya and his allies have continued to insist Mkhwanazi orchestrated a campaign against him, not the other way round — a feud Mkhwanazi himself has said will “never” be resolved amicably. And critics, including some inside the security cluster, argue that a year of suspensions without a single completed prosecution is not yet accountability, only its waiting room.

What is not in dispute is the scale of what Mkhwanazi’s briefing set in motion: a presidential commission, a parallel parliamentary ad hoc inquiry, two interim reports, more than a dozen generals suspended or removed, several arrests, one assassination, and — as of the September recess — 172 days of sworn testimony still running.

5. The story nobody has written as yet: what the recommendations may look like

Buried in coverage dominated by generals and gangsters, the commission’s final public session before the break was, unusually, not about who did what to whom. On 2 September — Day 172, and by the commission’s own account the first witness in months who was there “to answer for nothing and to accuse no one” — Dr Mark Shaw, executive director of the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, took the stand purely to help the commission think about what comes next.

Shaw, drawing on three decades of organised-crime research across nearly 200 countries, placed South Africa among the ten worst-affected states globally, worse on homicide indicators than Colombia or Mexico, with Gqeberha ranked third in the world for territorial gang violence. But the substance of his evidence was prescriptive rather than diagnostic — and it is the closest thing on the public record to a preview of the commission’s eventual recommendations.

Shaw’s proposals, as put to Madlanga directly, included:

• An Organised Crime Council, established by ministerial directive and funded from the existing police budget, bringing together government, civil society, academics, business and affected communities to set strategy and monitor implementation — built around five specific functions, from building political support for reform to advising the police minister directly.
• Urgent, transparent vetting and reappointment of senior officials across the police, the Hawks, the NPA, IDAC, IPID, the intelligence services and correctional services — institutions Shaw noted are currently led, in several of the most senior posts, only in an acting capacity.
• New legislation criminalising unexplained wealth among public officials, closing a gap Shaw argued has allowed implicated figures to accumulate assets without facing a specific offence tailored to that conduct.
• A specialised, centrally coordinated prosecutorial architecture modelled on Italy’s post-mafia restructuring of its own prosecution service — built, in Shaw’s telling, on the premise that an “ordinary” prosecution service cannot withstand a genuinely organised adversary.

“It is very important to strengthen and establish the current institutions that we have while beginning the process of change.”  — Dr Mark Shaw, GI-TOC executive director, addressing the Madlanga Commission

Madlanga’s own response — that the council idea “could be one they could build on” to ensure institutional independence — is as close as the chair has come, in public, to signalling the shape of his eventual findings. If the final report follows Shaw’s framework even loosely, South Africans should expect the November document to read less like a charge sheet and more like an institutional blueprint: a staged reform programme running in parallel with whatever prosecutions eventually follow from the Sibiya, Nkosi, Mogotsi and Witness G referrals.

6. What’s left, and why it still matters

When hearings resume in mid-September, the commission has roughly six weeks of scheduled testimony before public evidence closes on 2 October — by one public tally, around 35 working days and “scores of witnesses” still to come, including unresolved threads on the Port Shepstone cocaine heist, the Ekurhuleni and Tshwane municipal networks, and the co-funding arrangements behind the Matlala tenders. A final report follows on 16 November, six weeks after that.

The commission was born from a single, furious press briefing. It closes, if all goes to its extended schedule, having reshaped the leadership of the country’s police service, ended or suspended more careers than any comparable inquiry in South Africa’s democratic history, and cost one whistle-blower his life. Whether it ultimately earns the description its harshest critics still reserve for commissions of inquiry generally — expensive theatre that changes nothing — or the one its defenders are cautiously reaching for, will not be settled by the report itself. As Oosthuizen put it, the real test comes after: in courtrooms, in disciplinary panels, and in whether the institutions Mark Shaw spent Day 172 trying to redesign are still standing, reformed, when the cameras finally leave Pretoria.

This account draws on public reporting from the Presidency, SAnews, Daily Maverick, the Mail & Guardian, News24, IOL, TimesLIVE, EWN, SABC News, the Citizen, eNCA, the Institute for Security Studies and the commission’s own published record. Individuals named in referrals for disciplinary or criminal investigation are presumed innocent unless and until convicted; findings in interim reports are recommendations, not adjudications of guilt.