Kabelo Kgobisa-Ngcaba was the COO of Tony Leon’s Resolve Communications until she entered Parliament as a DA MP. Then she spent more than six months asking questions that helped build a campaigning case for two of its clients. Daily Maverick’s Rebecca Davis explains.
Reporting by: Rebecca Davis
Filmed by: Joel Seboa
Edited by: Joel Seboa
Produced by: Emilie Gambade
Creative lead by: Malibongwe Tyilo
Sub-edited by: Ian Wolstenholme
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A former senior employee of a lobbying firm enters Parliament as a DA MP.
Within months, she begins asking parliamentary questions about a narrow policy issue. The answers are then used in a media campaign promoting a specific change to the law.
And that change is exactly what two clients of her former lobbying firm are campaigning for.
This is the story of a DA MP, Tony Leon’s Resolve Communications, and an attempt to change South Africa’s SIM card laws.
As you may have seen, a public affairs firm called Resolve Communications has recently been at the centre of a growing political controversy.
This company, which does PR, crisis communications and political lobbying on behalf of private clients, was founded by former DA leader Tony Leon and is headed operationally by former DA CEO, Paul Boughey.
The current controversy started when former DA leader John Steenhuisen alleged that Resolve used its closeness to the DA to arrange meetings between private clients and DA ministers in the GNU. Former Environment Minister Dion George supported that account, while Communications Minister Solly Malatsi confirmed that Resolve approached him on behalf of clients after he entered government.
Former DA MP Phumzile Van Damme has also alleged that Resolve staff pressured her to stop publicly criticising one of its clients. The former DA Mayor of Johannesburg, Herman Mashaba, said Tony Leon approached him personally to ask him to consider using the services of a Resolve client in the Johannesburg metro. And News24 reported on an email in which a Resolve employee offered to draft parliamentary questions for a DA MP.
Resolve strongly denies that any of its conduct is improper and says this kind of lobbying is normal internationally.
The obvious difference, though, is that unlike in other countries, South Africa has no lobbying laws or regulations whatsoever. Lobbyists do not have to disclose which politicians they meet, what policies they are trying to influence or who is paying them.
That means the public has essentially no way of knowing when a politician’s actions overlap with the commercial interests of a private client.
While investigating Resolve’s relationship with the DA, I came across the case of Kabelo Kgobisa-Ngcaba.
The month before Kgobisa-Ngcaba entered Parliament in June 2024, she was still the chief operating officer of Resolve Communications.
She had worked there for around five years. She confirmed to me that she left Resolve in May 2024, immediately before becoming a DA MP.
There was no cooling-off period between the two roles.
Since entering Parliament, Kgobisa-Ngcaba has devoted significant attention to South Africa’s system for registering SIM cards.
Under the law known as Rica, every SIM card is supposed to be registered to its owner. But improperly registered and pre-registered SIM cards remain widely available and can facilitate crimes including bank fraud via SIM cards.
This is a genuine security problem.
But Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s involvement went beyond a single inquiry. Over more than six months, she tabled nine parliamentary questions about Rica, wrote an opinion article, and eventually gave media interviews promoting a very specific remedy to this problem: mandatory tamper-proof SIM card packaging.
Seven months before she entered Parliament, a company called Premium Ideas SA, or Pisa, had already made that argument to Parliament.
Pisa describes itself as a major SIM card packaging and logistics company.
In October 2023, it told Parliament that unpackaged and pre-registered SIM cards were a serious problem. Its proposed solution was for the law to prescribe minimum standards for SIM card packaging.
There is an obvious commercial interest here. Packaging SIM cards is a central part of Pisa’s business. A legal requirement for more secure packaging could create a substantial commercial opportunity.
The Justice Department noted Pisa’s proposal but did not adopt it.
We do not know whether Pisa was already a Resolve client at that stage.
But we do know that it was a client by November 2024.
Communications Minister Solly Malatsi confirmed that Resolve approached his office on Pisa’s behalf on 1 November 2024. A meeting followed later that month, and Malatsi was also called personally by Resolve CEO Paul Boughey about the matter.
By then, Kgobisa-Ngcaba had begun asking parliamentary questions about Rica.
Her first appeared on Parliament’s question paper on 5 September 2024.
There is an important detail in the timeline.
The previous day, Kgobisa-Ngcaba had been moved off Parliament’s Justice Committee and onto the Correctional Services Committee, where she remains the DA’s deputy spokesperson on prison matters.
MPs may ask questions about any department. There is nothing inherently improper about pursuing an issue outside an assigned portfolio.
But Kgobisa-Ngcaba told Daily Maverick that she posed the questions when Rica fell within the scope of her Justice portfolio.
The parliamentary record appears to contradict that. Almost all her Rica questions were tabled in the months after she left the Justice Committee, which is responsible for considering laws like Rica.
In November 2024, she published an opinion article calling for Rica reform and warning that third-party distributors were registering large numbers of SIM cards using generic information.
That closely resembled the problem Pisa had described to Parliament a year earlier, down to the wording.
At first, Kgobisa-Ngcaba focused on stricter identity checks and biometric registration for SIM cards, citing systems used in Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines and Sweden.
Three months later, another Resolve client entered the campaign.
The company was called Securi-Tech, which also provides SIM card packaging and security services.
In February 2025, Securi-Tech issued a statement calling for Rica reform, biometric verification and action against the mass registration of SIM cards. It cited the same countries Kgobisa-Ngcaba had referenced.
Company records show that Pisa and Securi-Tech are closely connected. All four active Securi-Tech directors are also directors of Pisa, and the companies share a registered address.
A Pisa representative confirmed that they belong to the same common group structure, although he stressed that they are separate legal entities.
Both companies have lobbied Parliament on the same issue. Pisa made its submission in 2023, while Securi-Tech announced in 2025 that it would write formally to the chairperson of Parliament’s Justice Committee.
The parliamentary questions asked by Kgobisa-Ngcaba would then provide this campaign with its most powerful statistic.
In November 2024, she asked the Police Minister what percentage of extortion, kidnapping, murder, robbery and cash-in-transit cases involved unregistered SIM cards.
The answer showed that 61.82% of extortion cases involved an unregistered SIM card.
But for kidnapping, murder, robbery and cash-in-transit cases, the recorded figure was zero percent.
Kgobisa-Ngcaba later suggested that the zero-percent figure reflected inadequate data collection. The Police Minister rejected that interpretation.
Before she submitted that follow-up question, however, Securi-Tech had already issued a statement using essentially the same framing: highlighting the extortion statistic while arguing that there was insufficient data about other serious crimes.
Then, in the week of 12 February 2025, more than a month after the minister’s answer was delivered, the 61.82% statistic suddenly appeared across multiple South African media outlets.
Three particular articles published by the Citizen, IOL and TechCentral within two days were strikingly similar.
They led with the statistic obtained through Kgobisa-Ngcaba’s parliamentary question, included fresh comment from the MP calling for Rica reform, meaning the journalists in all three cases had spoken to her directly, and all three articles quoted from Securi-Tech’s statement released that same day.
Resolve did not answer when I asked whether it had offered journalists interviews with Kgobisa-Ngcaba.
But the most significant overlap was the solution she now promoted.
Kgobisa-Ngcaba told the Citizen that South Africa needed secure, tamper-proof SIM card packaging.
TechCentral reported that she wanted operators to use thicker plastic packaging that could only be opened with scissors.
This was the same remedy promoted by Securi-Tech in the accompanying coverage, and the same measure Pisa had asked Parliament to put into law in 2023.
So what does this establish?
It shows that a former senior Resolve employee entered Parliament and asked questions which generated evidence later used in a campaign involving two Resolve clients.
She then publicly promoted the specific legislative intervention those clients wanted.
There is no evidence that Kgobisa-Ngcaba was paid or personally rewarded.
There is also no direct evidence that Resolve instructed her to ask the questions.
Resolve says it played no role in her parliamentary questioning. Kgobisa-Ngcaba says she acted on a serious security matter in the public interest.
The DA says MPs routinely receive proposals and suggested lines of inquiry from stakeholders, including public-affairs firms.
But those responses do not resolve the central question.
The issue is not whether unregistered SIM cards facilitate crime. They clearly can.
The issue is how a narrow commercial proposal moved from a SIM card packaging company, to the parliamentary questions of the former chief operating officer of that company’s lobbying firm, and then into a media campaign promoting the same company’s preferred remedy.
Daily Maverick’s research also found that mandatory tamper-proof packaging does not appear in leading international recommendations for improving SIM security.
Countries facing similar problems generally focus on biometric registration, identity verification, limits on the number of SIM cards one person may register and stronger controls over distributors.
That does not mean secure packaging would be useless, although it would only deal with one aspect of South Africa’s SIM card crime problem.
But it does mean this was a particularly specific proposal closely aligned with the business activities of the companies promoting it.
When controversy around Resolve first erupted, DA federal council chairperson Ashor Sarupen said there was no evidence that a party process or public office had been used to advance private commercial interests.
The case of Kabelo Kgobisa-Ngcaba makes that claim harder to sustain.
The fact remains that Kgobisa-Ngcaba moved directly from the senior management of a lobbying firm into the DA’s benches in Parliament and then proceeded to use parliamentary platforms to pursue an issue which did not directly fall under her oversight responsibilities, and she ended up recommending the same exact change to the law being pushed by two clients of the lobbying firm.
This investigation does not prove corruption.
What it reveals is the absence of clear boundaries between lobbying, party politics, parliamentary work and private commercial campaigning, and how difficult it is to prove clear lines between these things.
In a country with proper lobbying transparency rules, the public would not have to rely on assurances from the MP, the DA and Resolve that the facts I’ve just described were coincidental.
That is the larger significance of the SIM card story.
It shows how parliamentary questions and public-interest campaigns can align with private commercial goals without voters being told who stands to benefit.
And until South Africa regulates lobbying, the public may have no reliable way of knowing where political advocacy ends and private influence begins. DM
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