The Madlanga Commission Must Not Ignore the Billion-Rand Smoking Gun.

 

 

A billion-rand policing operation may have been guided not by crime intelligence or public-safety imperatives, but by a government apparatus whose strategic orientation has become increasingly indistinguishable from the corporate mining lobby and criminal interests.

When MACUA submitted evidence to the Madlanga Commission raising serious concerns about the evidence that had emerged in the Madlanga Commission about Operation Vala Umgodi and the deaths in Stilfontein, the Commission acknowledged receipt, but its hearings have yet to reflect any engagement with the issues raised. Instead, the inquiry has focused almost exclusively on the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) and the Ekhurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department.

To an extent, this is understandable. The Commission was established in response to allegations by General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi that the PKTT had been disbanded due to improper links between senior politicians and criminal syndicates. The inquiry was born from a politically charged moment, and it has been given an impossibly tight timeframe: three months for an interim report, six for a final one.

But while the narrow focus is understandable, it is no longer defensible.

Recent testimony from the Minister of Police’s Chief of Staff and from Brown Mogotsi, who appears to act as a conduit between the Minister and alleged syndicate-linked figures, has raised more questions than answers.

Both confirmed that meetings about Stilfontein took place at the Minister’s official residence. Mogotsi claims five unidentified individuals were present. The Chief of Staff says he simply organised the meeting but did not participate. The Commission has yet to ask who these individuals were or why such meetings were happening in a private residence rather than through formal policing channels.

Even more concerning, Mogotsi offered a timeline that is factually impossible: he claims to have discussed the arrest of a mining “kingpin” with the Minister in September and December 2024. Yet the arrest, and the suspect’s subsequent escape, happened only in January 2025.

This contradiction is not a footnote. It suggests either a deliberate attempt to mislead the Commission or undisclosed engagements with criminal elements long before the public became aware. Either possibility warrants scrutiny.

Yet the Commission moved on.

The R1.1 Billion Question

More than R1.1 billion has been spent on Operation Vala Umgodi over just three financial years. For a policing operation of this scale, South Africans would rightly expect major syndicate arrests, disrupted criminal economies, and intelligence-driven interventions.

Instead, we have:

• no major syndicate prosecutions,
• an embarrassing escape of a high-value suspect,
• contradictory testimony from senior officials, and
• 93 miners dead in Stilfontein, trapped in a police-enforced siege.

This raises an unavoidable question:
Was Vala Umgodi a genuine crime-fighting operation, or a billion-rand mechanism that punished the poorest while shielding the powerful?

The Commission has not asked.

In testimony before the South African Human Rights Commission, a Major General Asaneng revealed that Operation Vala Umgodi was not driven by Crime Intelligence, despite being presented as an anti-syndicate initiative. It was driven by the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources(DMPR), with the Minerals Council represented on the NATJOINTS structure which drove the operation.

This revelation is extraordinary.

The DMPR is not an intelligence or crime-fighting institution. Instead, it is a government department whose policy positions have increasingly aligned with those of the Minerals Council,  an alignment clearly reflected in the near-identical language between the Council’s submissions and the recently proposed MPRDA amendments. This pattern is not new. As I have argued elsewhere, South Africa’s Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy (2024) reads less like a national development framework and more like a wish list drafted by corporate lobbyists. Its language, promising to “unlock investment,” and “position South Africa as a global supplier”, mirrors the rhetorical playbook of the very industry it is meant to regulate, with barely a trace of community-centred or sovereignty-protective priorities.

Compounding these concerns is the fact that the Minerals Council was represented on a national security structure in violation of legal requirements that any private entity operating within state security operations be formally identified and transparently authorised.

This opaque involvement of private mining interests, combined with SAPS testimony that the DMPR itself identified “targets” and shaped the direction of Operation Vala Umgodi, raises a deeply troubling possibility: a billion-rand policing operation may have been guided not by crime intelligence or public-safety imperatives, but by a government apparatus whose strategic orientation has become increasingly indistinguishable from the corporate mining lobby and criminal interests.

This is not outside the Commission’s scope.
It is the clearest example of criminal, political and private-sector influence converging within policing, the very phenomenon the Commission was created to investigate.

The Commission’s Terms of Reference explicitly empower it to investigate:

• criminal infiltration of SAPS,
• improper external influence over policing,
• failures of intelligence,
• and distortions of police operations caused by political or private interests.

Yet the clearest and most damning case of all, Stilfontein, where more than R1.1 billion in state expenditure coincided with the deaths of 93 poor Black workers in what may be the most horrifying violation of the right to life in post-apartheid South Africa, remains largely unexamined. If the Commission is searching for a singular event that exposes the convergence of financial irregularity, criminal infiltration, and catastrophic policing failure, it need look no further than the bodies brought up from Shaft 11. Stilfontein is not merely relevant to the Commission’s mandate; it is the most brutal and expensive illustration of what happens when the state’s policing machinery is captured, misdirected, or co-opted.

There is now public evidence of:

• a syndicate figure escaping SAPS custody under suspicious circumstances,
• possible internal assistance,
• private-sector/ criminal element influence over policing strategy, and
• the DMPR directing a supposed crime-fighting operation.

Still, the Commission has not connected these dots.

No Commission can investigate everything. And the PKTT allegations do deserve attention. But the deaths of 93 people in Stilfontein, the disappearance of R1.1 billion into an operation not guided by intelligence, and the mounting evidence of political, criminal and private-sector convergence cannot simply be ignored.

If the Commission lacks the time to pursue these issues fully, it should at least acknowledge their seriousness and recommend further investigation, forensic audits, or prosecutorial review.

To remain silent is to leave the most significant policing scandal of the democratic era untouched.

The Madlanga Commission has an opportunity to expose the deeper structural rot that allowed criminal interests, political calculations and private-sector agendas to shape policing. But that truth will remain buried, like the miners in Stilfontein, if the Commission confines itself to the PKTT alone.

Fairness demands we acknowledge the Commission’s constraints.
Justice demands we insist that those constraints cannot erase the lives lost or the money unaccounted for.

South Africa’s policing crisis is broader, deeper, and deadlier than the PKTT.

Ignoring that fact will not make it any less true.