Beware the danger of treating Madlanga inquiry as a catalogue of villains

Share current article via Email Share current article via Facebook Share current article via Twitter Share current article via LinkedIn August 19, 2026.Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga during the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry at the Brigitte Mabandla Justice College in Pretoria. Picture: Freddy Mavunda © Business Day There was something particularly disturbing about Dr Mark Shaw's testimony at the Madlanga commission. Not because he introduced us to a criminal world we did not know existed, but because he gave us a framework for understanding much of what we have been watching unfold before the commission. For months, we have heard about compromised intelligence, police officers allegedly working with criminal networks, information being shared, investigations being interfered with, and organised crime reaching into institutions that are supposed to fight it. We have tended to look at these as individual acts of corruption. Shaw's testimony gave it a different perspective. The more important story is not simply that criminals infiltrated parts of the state but that organised criminal networks understood the environment they were infiltrating. That should matter. Organised crime is not chaotic crime. Its strength lies in its ability to organise, adapt and identify opportunity. A sophisticated network does not need to control an entire institution. It needs to understand where the vulnerabilities are and how to exploit them. It needs to know who has access to information. And who can let it function? A functioning democracy requires citizens who pay attention to what their institutions are doing. And, perhaps most importantly, it needs to understand the consequences of being exposed. That is what makes the alleged disturbance and infiltration of police intelligence so disturbing when viewed through this lens. If criminal networks were able to penetrate parts of the intelligence apparatus, the question cannot simply be 'who was compromised?' We should also be asking: What did those who were compromising understand about the system that allowed them to do so? Because they were not operating in a vacuum. They were operating inside a particular justice system, shaped by a particular history, with particular institutional strengths and weaknesses. A necessary transformation Shaw's discussion of the post-1994 justice system is important here. SA had to build a policing and justice system fundamentally different from the one that existed under apartheid. It had to restore public trust, protect citizens from state abuse and create institutions that were more accountable and rights-based. That transformation was necessary, but history does not freeze. The nature of the criminal threat changed too. And perhaps we did not sufficiently reckon with what happens when a system designed to prevent the abuse of state power is confronted by criminal networks sophisticated enough to learn how the system works and exploit its weaknesses. This is where Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi and Lt-Gen Dumisani Khumalo become particularly significant. Not because they somehow represent a perfect policing system. They don't. Their significance is in what their conduct, as presented to the commission, forces us to consider about the system itself. What happens when criminal networks have built their calculations around institutional vulnerabilities and then encounter police officers who refuse to operate according to those calculations? Then officers who follow the evidence beyond the obvious suspect. A lot of what this country is facing was reliant on changing that equation. Perhaps organised crime had become accustomed to a system in which it could exploit gaps between institutions, compromise individuals and use information to protect its interests. Then it encountered people within that system who were prepared to disrupt the network from inside. But what happens to an organised criminal network when the people inside the institution it has learned to exploit stop behaving predictably? Real test of resilience And this brings us back to Shaw's discussion of resilience. Resilience cannot simply mean having a police service, an intelligence structure, prosecutors and courts. The real test is whether those institutions can withstand an organised attempt to manipulate them. And when those institutions fail, can they correct themselves before the failure becomes systemic? Those questions make Shaw's warning about the timing of reform particularly significant. If something fundamental is to be done, he argued, the opportunity is now, while the commission still has the country's attention and while the political heat remains. That does not necessarily mean dismantling an entire police service and starting again. It means confronting the uncomfortable possibility that some of the problems being exposed are deeper than individual misconduct and require structural reform because there is a danger in treating the Madlanga commission as a catalogue of villains. Organised crime does not disappear when individual criminals are removed. If the vulnerabilities remain, someone else can exploit them. And that may ultimately be the test of the Madlanga commission. Not whether it successfully identifies the people who allegedly corrupted the system. But whether SA is willing to understand why the system was vulnerable enough to be corrupted in the first place and whether it can be rebuilt to withstand the criminals who have already learned how to navigate it. Perhaps the most unsettling lesson from Shaw's testimony is not that SA has a powerful organised crime problem. We already knew that. It is that organised crime may have become sufficiently sophisticated to understand the state's architecture. The question now is whether the state can become sophisticated enough to understand and dismantle the architecture of organised crime. And if we wait until the cameras leave, we may have lost the most important opportunity this commission has given us. Perhaps the first two steps have already been taken: we are beginning to understand what is happening in our country, and we are being forced to confront the problem's scale and sophistication. Citizens' role The next step cannot belong solely to the state. While the commission is still sitting, while the evidence is still fresh and while South Africans are paying attention, this is the moment for citizens to become more involved, not by attempting to conduct investigations themselves, but by demanding transparency, following the evidence, questioning institutional failures and holding those entrusted with our justice system accountable. We can't treat the Madlanga commission as something we watch and discuss before returning to our ordinary lives. A functioning democracy requires citizens who pay attention to what their institutions are doing, understand what those institutions are supposed to do and are willing to question them when they fail. Perhaps this is the opportunity Shaw was speaking about when he warned that something must be done while the commission's heat is still on. The commission has given us the information. Now we have to decide what we do with it. Because keeping the justice system in check cannot be the responsibility of police officers, prosecutors, judges, politicians and commissions alone. It is also a responsibility of the public whose trust gives those institutions their legitimacy.