Crime, chrome and the question the Madlanga Commission must still answer

The testimony unfolding before the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry carries the tension of a political thriller.

Millions of rand move through accounts on little more than trust and reputation. Politically connected intermediaries appear in the shadows between business and the state. Senior police officials stand accused of interference where the line between crime and power grows thin.

These are not ordinary allegations. They are matters of consequence, touching the highest levels of the country’s security establishment.

Almost lost in the detail of the commission’s proceedings is a small thread that, at first glance, appears incidental. During his testimony in March 2026, businessman Suleiman Carrim mentioned a chrome venture known as Chrome Core. The reference surfaced almost in passing, part of the wider web of financial relationships now being examined by the commission. Carrim told the inquiry that the project involved a proposed chrome wash and crushing plant established through a joint venture with businessman Morgan Maumela.

Carrim’s interests, however, extend beyond mining. He is also linked to a network of security companies operating from Mahikeng, including Fusion Tactical Team, a firm that has secured multimillion-rand security contracts from the North West provincial Department of Community Safety and Transport Management. The company markets specialised “tactical and rescue” capabilities designed for high-risk environments such as abandoned mine workings, precisely the kinds of conditions found across North West province.

Carrim’s business network sits squarely within the same provincial ecosystem where security contracts, mining interests and illegal-mining enforcement intersect. Other entities linked to this network, including Ziggy Security Services and financial dealings involving businessman Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, have also surfaced in the evidence now being explored by the commission.

Within the larger drama unfolding before the inquiry, the mention of Chrome Core might easily appear to be a minor detail.

The chrome wash and crushing plant

But in investigations of this nature, it is often the overlapping worlds of security, procurement and mineral extraction that reveal how influence actually operates.

Carrim told the inquiry that the project involved a proposed chrome wash and crushing plant established through a joint venture with businessman Morgan Maumela. According to his evidence, the two planned to create a company called Chrome Core in which each would hold a 50% stake.

The scale of the project was far from trivial. Carrim testified that both partners were expected to raise approximately R50-million each, with additional capital bringing the planned investment to about R110-million.

In the broader drama now unfolding before the commission, the reference to Chrome Core might easily be treated as a minor detail. But details, in inquiries like this, have a way of revealing the larger story.

The commission will ultimately determine whether the chrome venture was simply a failed business deal or something more serious. But the significance of Carrim’s testimony lies not only in the financial transactions themselves. It lies in the network of relationships the testimony has begun to reveal.

Because Chrome Core does not exist in isolation. It sits within the same ecosystem now under scrutiny by the commission, a world where private security networks, politically connected businessmen and elements of the policing apparatus intersect.

And it is here that the story becomes far more consequential.

A province under extraction

Over the past five to 10 years, the mining landscape of North West province has been quietly changing. Illegal mining has long existed in SA, particularly in abandoned gold shafts where informal miners, often called zama zamas, extract residual deposits.

But chrome has introduced a different dynamic. Unlike gold, chrome seams often lie closer to the surface. That makes them far easier to extract using relatively basic excavation techniques.

Between 2020 and 2022, chrome mining across parts of North West began expanding rapidly. At first the activity resembled traditional informal mining, small groups digging shallow pits or reworking abandoned land.

But by 2023, something had changed. Communities began reporting the arrival of excavators, front-end loaders and heavy trucks. Mining that had once been done by hand was now being carried out using machinery capable of moving hundreds of tons of earth.

Chrome extraction was no longer simply opportunistic. It was becoming industrial. And industrial extraction requires infrastructure, processing plants, transport networks and access to export markets.

That is why ventures like Chrome Core matter. A chrome wash and crushing plant capable of processing large volumes of ore creates demand for one thing above all else: a steady supply of raw chrome. Where that supply comes from is not always obvious.

The rise of enforcement

At roughly the same moment that chrome extraction was accelerating, the South African state began intensifying its response to illegal mining. In 2023, the police launched Operation Shanela, a national crime-fighting initiative aimed at tackling organised criminal activity, including illegal mining.

The following year, the strategy escalated. A multi-department campaign known as Operation Vala Umgodi was launched to shut down illegal mining networks by sealing access points to abandoned mines and disrupting supply routes. The logic behind the operation was simple, but the shortsighted strategy would soon have devastating consequences.

The target

One critical question has still not been adequately explained. How did Stilfontein become the central focus of Operation Vala Umgodi?

The decision appears to have taken shape through discussions at high levels of government. Evidence before the Madlanga Commission has already confirmed that meetings took place between political intermediary Brown Mogotsi and the minister of police concerning developments at Stilfontein. Yet the circumstances surrounding those discussions remain murky. The timelines are contested, and others who may have participated in those conversations remain largely faceless and unnamed.

Inquiries of this nature often reveal decisions only in fragments. What is clear, however, is that Stilfontein emerged as the most visible and controversial theatre of the state’s anti-illegal-mining campaign.

When the operation finally ended, 93 people had died in connection with the siege.

Meanwhile, chrome extraction elsewhere in the province continued to expand. Given what the Madlanga Commission has already revealed about the relationships between businessmen, intermediaries and elements within the policing establishment, it would be remiss not to ask whether these developments were entirely unrelated.

Influence

The Madlanga Commission has already heard evidence suggesting that powerful networks had access to senior levels of the state’s security structures. Testimony from witnesses including Brown Mogotsi has raised questions about intermediaries who maintained unusually close relationships with political leadership and police structures.

Other evidence has implicated both rank and file and senior officers within the policing hierarchy, including Deputy National Commissioner for Crime Detection, General Shadrack Sibiya. Some testimony has even suggested that influence may have extended to the level of Police Minister Senzo Mchunu.

But one fact is increasingly difficult to ignore. Evidence before the Madlanga Commission has already established that politically connected actors were operating inside networks that intersected directly with policing power.

Testimony has also revealed how those networks extended into law-enforcement structures themselves, including allegations that senior members of the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department were drawn into criminal operations linked to businessman Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, including the hijacking of freight trucks.

Taken together, this evidence points to a disturbing reality: networks with access to political and business power were operating within, and in some cases through, policing structures themselves.

In such circumstances, the deployment of policing power, including where and against whom it is directed, cannot be understood as neutral or accidental.

The diversion question

That question leads directly back to Stilfontein.

Because if organised interests had influence within policing structures, it is not unreasonable to ask whether enforcement operations might have been shaped in ways that benefited certain economic actors while targeting others.

This is not a conclusion the Madlanga Commission has yet reached.

But it is a line of inquiry that deserves serious examination.

Mining Affected Communities United in Action (Macua) and other civil society organisations have previously urged the commission to probe precisely this possibility, that Stilfontein may have served as a diversion, focusing national attention on one illegal mining network while a different extraction economy expanded elsewhere.

So far, the Commission has largely avoided confronting this question directly. Yet without it, the story emerging from the hearings remains incomplete.

The cost

The intrigue surrounding the Madlanga Commission, the businessmen, intermediaries, private security networks and political influence, risks obscuring the deeper reality beneath it.

While powerful networks manoeuvred within the shadow economy of mineral extraction, 93 miners died in Stilfontein. In a constitutional democracy founded on the rule of law, one of the most basic promises we make is that no person, no matter how poor, is denied due process.

Yet in Stilfontein, men living in desperate poverty were effectively cut off from the protections of that law. They were denied the ordinary safeguards that the Constitution is meant to guarantee, while those who profit most from the mineral economy continue to operate far from the shafts and the headlines.

If the powers of the state were turned against the most vulnerable while the true beneficiaries of the system remain untouched, then the injustice of Stilfontein runs deeper than a single tragedy.

It becomes a test of whether the values on which our democracy was founded still hold. And whether the law protects the poor with the same determination that it protects the powerful.

The arc toward justice

This is why the Madlanga Commission matters. Its task is not simply to untangle financial transactions or expose networks of influence within policing structures. It is to uncover the truth about how power operates in the shadow of the state.

If the commission follows the evidence wherever it leads, including the uncomfortable questions surrounding enforcement priorities and economic interests, it may yet illuminate the full story of what happened in North West.

Justice, in situations like this, rarely arrives quickly. But the search for truth matters.

For the families of the 93 miners who died in Stilfontein, and for the communities across the country who continue to live with poverty beside extraordinary mineral wealth, the possibility of accountability carries a deeper meaning.

It carries the possibility that the arc of justice, however slow, might bend toward a simple but powerful recognition that their lives matter too. DM