EDITORIAL | The Madlanga commission has shown us the only way corruption can be beaten

When President Cyril Ramaphosa first announced a commission headed by justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga to investigate damning allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi about senior officers and politicians allegedly working in cahoots with criminal networks, there were complaints of “commission fatigue”, with critics doubting whether the exercise would yield much.

Less than a year after the commission started holding public hearings into the claims, there is hardly a commentator who still believes the process to be a waste of time.

On the contrary, there are suggestions that the commission — or a similar body — should become a permanent feature if South Africa is to win the battle against corruption and the criminalisation of some of the country’s public institutions.

Such suggestions demonstrate the public’s vote of confidence in the work that Madlanga and his team have been doing to expose the rot that has rendered the country’s law enforcement agencies largely ineffective in fighting organised crime.

They also show the low level of trust the public currently has in the police, the Hawks and other state agencies created and funded to carry out those very functions.

This is particularly true of the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (Idac) — a permanent anti-corruption unit created under the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) with much fanfare following recommendations from the state capture commission headed by retired chief justice Raymond Zondo.

At its inception, Idac was envisaged as the body that would spearhead the country’s fightback against graft and state capture by taking up high-profile cases involving the theft of hundreds of millions of rands from parastatals and government departments.

Yet evidence emerging from the Madlanga commission suggests that in less than two years since becoming fully functional, Idac has become a tool used by a group within it to fight factional battles and influence the succession race for the next national police commissioner. Its head, advocate Andrea Johnson, had to quit the job in disgrace recently, while some of her top investigators have now been suspended by the NPA. These developments have seriously dented the public’s trust in Idac.

Hence the belief that none of the state law-enforcement agencies can be trusted and that a commission of inquiry headed by a judge should be a permanent feature with powers to probe cases beyond Madlanga’s scope.

Supporters of this view point to several breakthroughs that have been made within a year as a result of the work done by the Madlanga commission. Almost every week there are arrests of individuals who have been implicated, while others are being suspended from their posts as investigations continue.

However, the problem is not fundamentally with Idac, the SAPS, crime intelligence, the Hawks or any of the law-enforcement agencies.

We can easily create yet another crime-busting agency and commission to add to the existing ones. But as long as the wrong people are appointed to head and run these bodies, those new structures will encounter the same problems we are witnessing now. Idac didn’t fail because the structure was a bad idea; it is failing because individuals with nefarious motives were appointed to run it, without enough checks and balances to hold them to account.

The key lesson from the Madlanga commission is that the battle against corruption can be won only if those who do the appointing select the most upstanding, highly skilled and dedicated professionals to lead — coupled with effective oversight mechanisms.