Madlanga Commission battles sweeping scope, tight timelines and unwieldy terms of reference

“We can confirm that the National Commissioner of Police, General Fannie Masemola, will testify before the commission of inquiry tomorrow [Monday], 22 September 2025,” said Jeremy Michaels, the spokesperson for the commission, on Sunday.

With South Africa’s highest-ranking police officer due in the hot seat on Monday, the Madlanga Commission is well and truly under way.

But almost as quickly as the commission was convened, it drew questions from legal experts, activists and civil society about whether its brief was manageable and properly focused.

Critics worry that an ambit that stretches from the infiltration of crime syndicates into policing to possible failures of oversight across the executive and judicial branches risks producing a sprawling inquiry that will be impossible to comprehensively probe.

Supporters argue, on the other hand, that only wide terms can capture what may be a systemic problem — and that the terms have to be wide, essentially because we don’t know the breadth of the issue.

This debate is now at the centre of the commission’s early days, and it matters because the commission has only six months, at least on paper, to complete its work.

What do the terms of reference say?

The commission’s terms of reference (ToRs) are undeniably sweeping.

Published in the Government Gazette on 23 July, they task the inquiry with determining whether criminal syndicates have “infiltrated or exerted undue influence” over the South African Police Service, metropolitan police departments, the National Prosecuting Authority, the State Security Agency, the judiciary, the Department of Correctional Services and “any other institutions and/or organs of state within the criminal justice system”.

They require the commission to examine the “nature, extent and consequences of such infiltration”, to investigate police officers, judges and members of the executive, and to assess oversight mechanisms and existing legislation. It must file an interim report within three months and a final report within six months of establishment. 

That timeframe helps to explain the anxiety felt by some lawyers.

“The first thing is that they have a decision to make — do they wait for evidence to come to them or do they positively investigate [as the Zondo Commission did]?” a senior legal expert told Daily Maverick.

“If the commission waits [for evidence to come to it], I’m afraid it’s going to turn into a squabble with no conclusion. Just Spy vs Spy.”

He warned that the range of entities to be investigated meant that the process would never be completed within six months if the commission attempted to start from first principles.

He pointed out that the terms of reference require the commission to probe “the role of any member of the national executive responsible for the criminal justice system”, whether they were actively complicit or guilty by virtue of failing to act.

This, too, is extremely wide, since it could be defined as applying to political figures beyond the minister of police.

“Because the President has overrule within the executive, and because state security falls under his office, they could call [Ramaphosa] to account,” he said.

A plurality of views

But not everyone sees the terms as a problem.

The Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution’s (Casac’s) Lawson Naidoo told Daily Maverick: “I do not believe that the ToRs are necessarily too wide or vague.”

Naidoo said much would come down to how Judge Madlanga chose to run the inquiry.

“Madlanga must interpret the ToRs in a way that will enable the commission to probe and produce reports that not only address the key aspects of [KZN Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Nhlanhla] Mkhwanazi’s allegations, but also chart a way forward that enhances the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies,” said Naidoo.

The issue of the commission’s processes was also raised by the senior legal expert, who said he had concerns about the handling of Mkhwanazi’s three days of testimony last week.

“Mkhwanazi was just allowed to make all the allegations, while normally [the allegations] should be presented along with the evidence. The witness was just given free rein to say whatever he wished.”

Mkhwanazi noticeably produced very little in the way of hard evidence regarding his explosive claims, which link Minister of Police Senzo Mchunu to a syndicate of hitmen and other criminals.

Support from task team dissident 

The catalyst for the commission’s establishment was the decision by Mchunu to disband KwaZulu-Natal’s Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) — which Mkhwanazi maintains was a move made to protect criminals.

But someone who repeatedly pleaded with Mchunu and Parliament for the PKTT to be disbanded was veteran KZN violence monitor Mary de Haas, who told Daily Maverick this week that she is still adamant about this view.

“Yes, I stand by my call, more than ever since I sent that letter to Parliament and the minister,” said De Haas.

De Haas’s claims are effectively the opposite of Mkhwanazi’s. Mkhwanazi says the task team was disbanded because they were going after hitmen; De Haas says the task team was notorious for what she calls “malicious prosecutions which, in every case I have dealt with, appear to be cover-ups for politicians and their taxi hitmen contacts”.

De Haas also claims that the task team acted with recklessness and violence.

“They seize phones without court orders and search homes without warrants, and regularly torture people, not just suspects but people they want to try and persuade to be witnesses, using plastic bag tubing,” she alleges.

“I also have evidence that they take dockets that are not part of their mandate.”

In Mkhwanazi’s testimony last week, he implied that he believed that De Haas’s campaign against the PKTT was the reason it was disbanded.

But De Haas finds this unlikely, telling Daily Maverick: “I think the information I supplied may have contributed to the decision by the minister, but I am sure he would have looked further than that”.

Given the fact that her vision of the PKTT is so opposed to Mkhwanazi’s, one may have thought that De Haas would have spent the first few days of the Madlanga Commission shaking her fist at the TV — but she insists this was not the case.

“I am impressed by the commission generally; I think it can do very important work in cleaning up the police if all goes according to plan,” she said.

“We also believe that there are some attempts to stop people telling the commission their own stories and hope that there won’t be any violence against them.”

What is at stake

What the Madlanga Commission finds will matter in concrete ways. If the inquiry establishes systemic infiltration of law enforcement by criminal elements and names culpable officials, it could lead to immediate criminal investigations and subsequent legislative reform.

If it fails to make enforceable recommendations, or if its report is ignored, the inquiry could deepen public cynicism about the justice system while leaving the structures that allowed the alleged infiltration intact.

What is clear is that Judge Madlanga, his co-chairs and the evidence leaders will have to make hard decisions about how to bend the commission’s optimistic timeframe to the messy realities of evidence gathering. DM