Ah, Chief Dwasaho! This week’s theatrics before the ad hoc parliamentary committee and the Madlanga Commission — those entrusted with unravelling the slow-burning disaster of justice capture and political interference in the South African Police Service (SAPS) — reminded me of the very first English book I ever read: Fools and Other Stories by Njabulo S Ndebele (1983).
Yes, my leader — fools! The perfect companion for a South Africa where truth limps into the room while selective amnesia sprints past like a Comrades champion coached by denial. Watching esteemed comrades twist themselves into philosophical pretzels to dodge simple yes-or-no questions, I was reminded that this time the foolishness isn’t fiction; it’s live streamed, taxpayer funded, and comes complete with legal teams and overnight media coaching.
Mr Brown, agent of fools
This week’s episode of the Madlanga Commission — starring one Mr Brown Mogotsi, sometime North West businessman (depending on who you ask), sometime “contact agent”, sometime intelligence theorist — confirmed what my first English book warned me about decades ago: Fools and Other Stories was not fiction, my leader, it was a future post-apartheid school curriculum.
Mr Brown introduced himself to the bewildered nation as a long-standing Crime Intelligence asset — first as an informant from 1999, later elevated to “contact agent” in 2009, tasked with feeding sensitive information into the SAPS. So far, so cloak and dagger. Then the script veered straight into Hollywood espionage.
Mr Brown told the Madlanga Commission that he tricked the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) police commissioner, Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, into believing he was an SAPS infiltrator. He (Mr Brown) claimed he was actually running a counter-operation on the commissioner and on alleged Gauteng crime boss Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala. This was delivered with a straight face, despite testimony and WhatsApp evidence linking him (Mr Brown) to Matlala resurfacing in prior sittings.
Because what we watched was not a search for truth. It was a full-tilt sh*t show, a chaotic sequel to the recent slick Khumalo Productions™ season at the same commission.
According to his version, the cosy interactions that Mkhwanazi and others have described as suspicious were actually an elaborate art project in “legend building”: constructing a fake persona to move closer to targets for investigative purposes.
Show, don’t tell
But my leader, the plot didn’t stop there. In one of his most dramatic claims, Mr Brown told the commission that after South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice over Gaza in 2023, “interests” abroad worried about coal exports through Richards Bay — and that this somehow led to a “real suspicion” that both Mkhwanazi and Zulu King Misuzulu kaZwelithini had been recruited by the CIA to protect those interests. No documents. No signal intercepts. No bank trail. Evidence leaders grilled Mr Brown after his witness statement, and they demonstrated that he had no proof, only what he calls information from a source, with a name, no surname and no known affiliation.
My leader, when a man pitches a story that turns the KZN police commissioner and the Zulu monarch into CIA assets over coal (no coal mining in Richards Bay), you must ask yourself: Are we at a judicial commission or a Netflix pitch meeting?
Legend building vs WhatsApp reality
Here’s where the sh*t show really matures. Senior police officials have already told the commission that Mr Brown operated as a middleman between suspended police minister Senzo Mchunu and Gauteng-based criminal cartels, including the so-called “Big Five” syndicate led by Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala.
Crime Intelligence boss Lieutenant-General Dumisani Khumalo — star of the earlier slick Khumalo Productions™ — previously presented WhatsApp messages showing Mr Brown soliciting funds from Matlala, who is facing murder and organised crime allegations and has been linked to a R360-million police healthcare contract.
Khumalo’s earlier evidence mapped out the “Big Five” cartel’s alleged footprint: drugs, hijackings, tender fraud, even payments to ANC delegates, plus claims that the syndicate helped drive efforts to shut down the Political Killings Task Team.
Now, when confronted with this, Mr Brown tells the commission it was all part of “legend building” — his way of getting close to suspects by creating a fake life, fake deals, fake alliances.
My leader, only in South Africa do we reach a point where alleged cartel WhatsApps, alleged bribe flows and an alleged R360-million tender scheme are explained away as character development.
No entry, fools zone
In Ndebele’s Fools, the tragedy is not found in spectacular betrayals but in the slow erosion of a man’s moral centre — how everyday compromises hollow people out long before the world notices. Zamani, the once-idealistic teacher, doesn’t fall in a single dramatic moment; he disintegrates through tiny permissions he grants himself: a silence here, an evasion there, a surrender to convenience disguised as pragmatism. By the time his community sees him for what he has become, his inner collapse is already complete.
That, my leader, is what echoed through the Madlanga Commission this week. We watched grown men arrive with polished titles and padded CVs, only to expose the hollowness left behind by years of small, unchallenged concessions — to power, to fear, to ambition, to the intimacy of wrongdoing. It was Ndebele’s thesis on display in real time: the actual danger to a nation is not the loud villain, but the ordinary man who keeps shaving slivers off his conscience until there is nothing left to defend.
At the Madlanga Commission, the tragedy is that those compromises now arrive with PowerPoint slides, lawyers and fibre-streamed testimony.
The Mary de Haas show
Across the country in Cape Town, my leader, the nation was treated to yet another episode of our ongoing governance telenovela: The Mary de Haas Show, live from Good Hope Chambers.
In Ndebele’s Fools, the tragedy is how small concessions chip away at a person’s integrity until only the shell remains. In Cape Town this week, we saw a different kind of erosion at play — not the slow decay of conscience, but the slow decay of rigour.
For decades, Mary de Haas has written letters and affidavits, filed submissions, and positioned herself as a watchdog on policing. But when she finally appeared before Parliament’s ad hoc committee, the moment demanded precision, documentation, and clarity, and she arrived with none. MPs from across party lines pressed her for evidence, asked her to substantiate her claims, and urged her to name sources even in camera, but she refused throughout. She allowed herself to be introduced as “Professor” and “Doctor” without correction, even though she holds neither title.
Theatre of the absurd
Instead of illuminating the complex terrain of political violence she claims to monitor, the hearing dissolved into performance: De Haas gesturing broadly about “patterns” and “information”, MPs growing visibly frustrated as the promises of expertise evaporated under questioning. What should have been an opportunity to strengthen public understanding of political killings became a spectacle of half-answers and evasions — a reminder that, in the fight for truth, pedigree is irrelevant without proof.
The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) had to issue a formal public statement the following day, clarifying that Mary de Haas is neither an employee nor a professor at the university. It confirmed that she retired from the erstwhile University of Natal in 2002, and that her current link is limited to an honorary research fellow title: a non-teaching, non-employment association.
The statement emphasised that her work on violent crime and policing is entirely independent of the university, and that UKZN would not comment on anything she told Parliament. In other words, while MPs were asking her to show the country her academic credentials, the university was quietly reminding the nation that she does not speak for it. Instead of providing clarity on police interference, her testimony became an exercise in ambiguity — a performance where authority was assumed rather than earned.
Moral decay on live TV
In the end, my leader this week proved that South Africa’s crisis is not a shortage of voices, but a shortage of courage. Too many of our so-called experts arrive armed with theories, not truth; with posture, not evidence. Mr Brown hid behind “legend building”, De Haas behind unverified authority — both shrinking when the country needed them to stand tall.
Like Ndebele’s Zamani, they showed us how small compromises, repeated often enough, strip a person down to performance and excuses. And when testimony becomes theatre, my man, the truth is left wandering outside the building, begging to be let in.
Till next week, my man. Send me nowhere. DM