Payment pending — how the Fred Daniel matter taints the state attorney

Still in the dark, but with documents

“Could you please advise [about]… the payment of the taxed costs,” wrote Felix Mbeki, South Africa’s acting solicitor-general, in an email to two of his subordinates on 3 February 2026. “We are likely going to get a media enquiry or a parliamentary question in this matter.”

The subordinates to whom the email was addressed were Isaac Chowe and Simon Mosito, the state attorneys assigned to case number 34502/2010 of the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Pretoria, known to ordinary South Africans as the legal battle between conservationist Fred Daniel and the country’s former deputy president, David Mabuza.

As the email chain showed, the last time that Mbeki had requested an update from Chowe and Mosito was on 9 December 2025, when he reminded them that he had been pushing for closure on the matter since late August 2025.

Daniel’s attorney, as Mbeki informed his staffers at the time, “keeps on phoning and sending text messages”.

But on 3 February 2026, as suggested by his reference to probable media and parliamentary scrutiny, there appeared to be more on Mbeki’s mind than pressure from the plaintiff’s attorney.

That same morning, Daily Maverick’s lead story was an item headlined “No funds, no answers — government’s ‘dark’ appeal against R306m damages award to conservationist Fred Daniel”.

The South African government, we reported, had decided to appeal against the historic ruling of Judge Neil Tuchten, in which it had been decreed for the first time that Mabuza — who had died in early July 2025 — was a primary architect of the so-called “land claims scam”. Given that Tuchten had referred in his judgment to the state-sponsored “criminal mob” behind the scam, we noted, the appeal itself was unsurprising. What was surprising was that the first government defendant in the matter, the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency (MTPA), had declared a few months before Tuchten’s ruling that the case was “not affordable”.

Who, then, had made the decision to incur the additional costs of an appeal?

By Daily Maverick’s reckoning, if it was indeed our article that had inspired Mbeki to request an update from Chowe and Mosito, it was probable that this question had caused him some concern. As a high-level functionary at the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DoJ&CD), with a direct reporting line to Minister Mmamoloko T Kubayi (the only other functionary that reports directly to the minister, as the departmental organogram shows, is the director-general), Mbeki would have read in our piece that his boss had refused to answer the question.

He would also have read, as we reported, that the question was left unanswered by his own office — which, in late November 2025, had been the government entity that announced the intention to appeal.

And so, on 23 February 2026, in a list of follow-up questions to Mbeki, we asked once again. Since the MTPA had stated in its latest annual report (see pages 25, 186 and 267) that it could no longer afford the legal fees in the matter, why had permission been granted for the government defendants to take case number 34502/2010 to the Supreme Court of Appeal? Also, who in government had made the decision?

As we informed Mbeki, although a number of his departmental colleagues — including Minister Kubayi’s personal assistant — had assured us of a response by late January 2026, we were still very much in the dark. But the reason for our follow-up, we stated, was not because we were now blindly trying our luck; it was because, since publication of our article on 3 February, we had come into possession of a pair of enlightening documents.

The first was the email chain cited above, which showed that for six months — from mid-August 2025 until mid-February 2026 — the office of the state attorney had been promising (and failing) to pay the three cost orders awarded to Daniel in case number 34502/2010. The second was a copy of these very same cost orders, stretching back to 2019 and totalling around R700,000, as received and stamped by the Mbombela sheriff on 19 February 2026.

Daniel, in other words, had become so frustrated by the inaction of the office of the state attorney that he had been left with no choice but to enforce the seizure of an assortment of assets — specifically, vehicles, computers and furniture — from the MTPA’s headquarters in the Mpumalanga capital.

Weapons of lawfare

“In the present case,” declared Judge Tuchten on page 169 of his September 2025 ruling, “the fault of the defendants cannot be restricted to their own individual wrongful actions, but must properly be seen as a course of conduct which, I believe it is no exaggeration to say, weaponised numerous aspects of the law enforcement and regulatory mechanisms in the province to persecute one man and frustrate his entirely lawful and, indeed, admirable dream.”

As Daily Maverick had reported a number of times since taking up the case in early 2021, the “weaponisation” of taxpayer-funded institutions did not begin or end with law enforcement and the regulatory agencies — if the relentless Stalingrad tactics of the government defendants was any indication (as indeed it was; see here and here), the procedures of the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Pretoria had been weaponised against Daniel too.

And nowhere, perhaps, was this weaponisation as obvious as it was in the three interlocutory applications that the plaintiffs had won “with costs” — the plaintiffs’ application to force the defendants’ discovery in 2019; the defendants’ application to force the recusal of Daniel’s advocate, Jacques Joubert, in 2023; and, most revealingly, the defendants’ application to force the recusal of Judge Tuchten in 2025.

To Daily Maverick, it was therefore plausible that the substance of the cost orders was another source of Mbeki’s concern. Was this partly why he was worried about media and parliamentary scrutiny? Had he read in our article of 3 February how Judge Tuchten had leaned on the authority of the Constitutional Court to demonstrate why the application for his recusal — as led by senior counsel of the MTPA — was rationally and legally “absurd”?

Of course, it would have been preferable not to speculate — but, like his colleagues at DoJ&CD, the acting solicitor-general chose not to respond to our questions.

Still, on 26 February 2026 — three days after our questions had been sent and, perhaps more significantly, a week after the Mbombela sheriff had stamped the cost orders — Daniel’s legal team received an email from the office of the state attorney.

“As government,” Mosito wrote, “[we are] required to effect payment and same has been outstanding for long.”

Once the technical issue of registration on the government supplier database had been sorted out, Mosito added, the deposit would be forthcoming.

On 5 March, in response to yet another request from Daniel’s attorneys, Mosito replied that the cost orders were in the accounts section for “urgent payment”.

Dreams and recurring nightmares

“For six months, they have been using every trick in the book not to pay the taxed costs,” said Daniel to Daily Maverick on the morning of 6 March 2026. “And suddenly, it’s as if the dam wall has broken. The government officials are starting to cooperate.”

From our perspective, there was no reason to doubt his interpretation. For starters, as evidenced in the latest email chain between the office of the state attorney and Daniel’s legal team — a thread that ran from 26 February to 5 March — the tone of the government solicitors had become a lot more accommodating. Then, as a major incentive, there was the pressure that had been brought to bear by the imminent seizure of the MTPA’s assets. Finally, as foretold by Mbeki in his internal email of 3 February, the media (in the form of Daily Maverick’s questions) was starting to show an interest.

As Daniel informed us, payment of the taxed costs was expected by Monday, 9 March at the latest.

“They now have an account that’s open in our name,” he said. “It’s a dream come true, from the perspective of any litigation, to know that money has flowed from the government for the first time. Who knows, after this, the appeal might even collapse.”

But by mid-morning on Wednesday, 11 March, with nothing to show in the trust account of his attorney, Daniel would be forced to return to his default stance — the final go-ahead for seizure and auctioning of the MTPA’s assets, he told us, would be given within the hour.

At the time of this writing, late afternoon on 11 March, Daily Maverick had heard nothing further. At any moment, we knew, the office of the state attorney could decide to pay the taxed costs. Still, even if that did happen, the unanswered questions would remain.

If the MTPA could no longer afford the legal fees, what was the incentive to continue with the case? Given that former deputy president Mabuza was now deceased, who in the upper echelons of government was driving the appeal? If DoJ&CD had indeed undertaken to cover the MTPA’s outstanding legal fees, a figure that amounted to more than R15-million, according to the agency’s latest annual report, was there a limit to their generosity?

And then there was the big question, the one that only Daniel seemed able to answer — if the office of the state attorney, as a division of DoJ&CD, was so reluctant to cover the MTPA for a paltry R700,000, how would the same government department ever make good on the R306-million in damages (a figure now closer to R400-million, inclusive of interest and costs) that had been awarded to Daniel by Judge Tuchten?

“To the government, there’s no difference,” said Daniel, “it costs them millions to run the appeal, they could use those same funds to settle. Remember, as soon as they pay, I’ll launch my next conservation project and plough the money back into the economy.”

Daily Maverick, as ever, will be watching. DM