Letter to Mahlamba Ndlopfu: For how long will we keep throwing baby showers for stillborn reforms?

The womb of the Republic, where justice ought to be conceived, carried and safely delivered, is no longer fit for purpose. Prosecutions miscarry, and anything that reaches term arrives underweight and gasping.

By Bhekisisa Mncube

29 Aug 2025

Ah, Chief Dwasaho! Our House of Justice has been at sixes and sevens — more to the sevens — over the failure to secure the “necessary infrastructure” for the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference, and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System (informally, the Madlanga Commission).

The commission was due to commence on 1 September 2025; instead, it has been delayed by procurement bungles. With a straight face, the commission announced the delay to the bewildered public while apportioning the blame correctly to the no-Justice Department and un-Constitutional Development.

What were they expecting, except “the insolence of office and the spurns/That patient merit of the unworthy takes”?

Data or drones?

You’d wager — if I were a gambling man, which I am not — that the mandarins at the No-Justice Department were instructed to forget laptops, data, an AI subscription for transcribing, or even booking a venue, and instead focus on procuring kamikaze drones, grabbers and a submarine.

Drive-through disciplinary action

Inexplicably, the Minister of no-Justice and un-Constitutional Development, Mmamoloko Kubayi, sought, and was granted, a presidential delegation to institute disciplinary proceedings against the Director-General, Advocate “Doc” Mashabane. “Doc”, not to be confused with “Dr”, now becomes the first DG to be hustled through a drive-through disciplinary (DC) after “failing to perform to the best of his ability” in under 30 days.

Were I him, I would drag the department to court. When the department underperformed, how did the minister single him out, along with one other senior official? On any fair reading, the government belongs in the dock, not merely “Doc”.

I suspect he laboured under the fatal illusion that it was business as usual: the same old culture of slow-walking justice, much like the failure to prosecute the miscreants fingered by various commissions of inquiry since 1995.

Lack of political will or insolence of power?

Comrade Leadership, can a bureaucrat be liable for a deficit of political will at the top of Gwavament? No. A director-general answers for what they control: budgets, procurement, timelines, risk registers, escalations under the Public Finance Management Act and the Public Service Act.

They do not carry the can for ministers who withhold approvals, starve projects or play politics. Hold officials accountable for negligence, yes, but do not confuse a missing backbone in the Executive with misconduct in the administration.

Missing the tide

My leader, you appointed retired Constitutional Court Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga to steady the ship on 31 July 2025. Forty-seven days later we are still rearranging the deckchairs on a becalmed vessel. Regulations arrived only on 19 August; a “significant portion” of the three-month window has already slipped by without a single witness being heard.

This is no theatre of justice; it is “the law’s delay” made flesh. As Brutus warned: “There is a tide in the affairs of men”; ours was missed, leaving much “sound and fury” and precious little to show for it: a tragedy of Roman proportions.

Who has performed better, the mandarins, the commission or the minister in the past 47 days?

Do you get it, Leadership? Sisenjeni (“dog house”), as amapantsula would opine.

Memory? We aren’t elephants

Because memory in this Republic can be slippery, let us put a stopwatch on it, my leader. The TRC’s Amnesty Committee delivered its final report on 21 March 2003; by today, that is 22 years, five months and eight days ago, not a day less.

The TRC urged prosecutions in about 300 cases where amnesty was refused or never sought; families insist politics throttled those cases. Hence, this year, a new judicial commission led by retired Constitutional Court Justice Sisi Khampepe must inquire into alleged executive interference in the investigation and prosecution of apartheid-era crimes.

Comrades, read slowly: a commission of inquiry has been established to investigate why the recommendations of another commission of inquiry gathered dust. Fellow South Africans, you couldn’t make this s**t up.

Irony, what irony?

Ah, let’s talk about the irony of ironies. Retired Justice Khampepe now presides over the commission into alleged interference in TRC prosecutions, yet she knows what it is to have sober counsel ignored.

In 2006, her Khampepe Commission of Inquiry into the Mandate and Location of the Directorate of Special Operations (DSO) urged keeping the Scorpions within the NPA while harmonising political oversight, not folding them into the police.

Parliament chose the opposite: the Scorpions were dissolved and the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI, “the Hawks”) was birthed inside the South African Police Service (SAPS), a design the Constitutional Court later held failed to secure adequate independence. This, too, was ignored, and Khampepe was a member of the Constitutional Court. I wonder if she sat on that hearing.

Trivia: Sisi Khampepe signed off on the TRC final report in 2003. Third time lucky indeed.

Peek-a-boo games

Let’s play peek-a-boo: who remembers the Marikana (Farlam) Commission report, released on 25 June 2015? By today, that’s 10 years, two months and four days — the state pops out, shouts “now you see us”, then vanishes again behind the curtain.

The commission urged further criminal investigation by the NPA and reforms in public order policing. Yet, we remain marooned in the Republic of “under consideration”, with fits and starts in recent weeks and no end in sight. What a circus — new clowns, same tent, the ringmaster forever “on the way”.

My leader, on 10 July 2024, the Life Esidimeni Inquest found prima facie criminal liability in nine deaths. Today — one year, one month and 19 days later — families still await decisive prosecutions. The ANC’s Qedani Mahlangu (former Gauteng Health MEC) and Dr Makgabo Manamela (former head of mental health services) remain the names that haunt the docket.

Yet, the NPA is, for now, contemplating charges in only two deaths. That posture has drawn sharp rebuke from families and civil society alike: justice on lay-by, interest accruing, accountability nowhere in sight.

Lest memory fail us, nine years ago 144 mental healthcare patients died, and more than 1,400 were affected after being moved from Life Esidimeni to ill-equipped, unlicensed NGOs.

Ubani uZondo?

Zondo, who? Retired Chief Justice Raymond Zondo handed over the final State Capture Commission volumes on 22 June 2022. Yet by today — three years, two months and seven days later — still no senior ANC leader had been convicted.

This was after he (Zondo) pulled the curtain on at least 97 past and present members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee. He was too judicial to declare they’d flunked the ANC’s Eye of the Needle catechism, the moral Bible everyone has and no one reads.

And you, my leader, have conceded that there’s been precious little consequence management from the Zondo gig. Meanwhile, even my star cats — Tigger and Smudge — who patrol the perimeter of our upmarket Waterkloof family home with the zeal of overpaid Blue Light Brigade members, sprint to their treats with more urgency than your prosecutors muster to place a docket on the roll.

As I document here and here, Parliament and the Executive resemble a rogues’ gallery.

Womb not fit for purpose

Perhaps we need another commission to discover why ANC-connected worthies always sidestep the dock. Let it be chaired not by a retired judge but by the commentariat, presided over by Eshowe’s finest son of MaMlambo, me. Eight hours, tops. R2,000 for a decent lunch. No witnesses. No rereading of forgotten recommendations. No reheated terms of reference. No media circus. We convene, write, sign and go home.

Our single finding: the womb of the Republic — where justice ought to be conceived, carried, and safely delivered — is no longer fit for purpose. It is inhospitable to the embryo of accountability: prosecutions miscarry, investigations are induced prematurely for optics, and anything that reaches term arrives underweight and gasping.

What is required is a transplant of institutions: appointments insulated from party patronage, ring-fenced budgets, statutory timelines enforced, and midwives who know their craft — prosecutors, investigators, auditors — empowered to cut the cord cleanly.

Until then, we will keep throwing baby showers for stillborn reforms: speeches instead of summonses, strategy documents instead of indictments, like the infamous Nine-Point Plan, lullabies where there should be labour.

All maths was outsourced to artificial intelligence, hhayi phela. I am a professional black. Apartheid Bantu Education, anyone? Still with some dignity, though.

Fare thee well, Tshidi Madia — you stood up for South Africa in Washington; a true daughter of the soil.

Till next week, my man. Send me to another commission — yawn, yawn. DM

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