Madlanga Commission turns one year old with senior police arrests on the record
The inquiry into criminality inside the criminal justice system has heard a year of evidence and produced arrests at the top of law enforcement, with reform the stated aim.
A commission set up to examine criminality inside South Africa’s criminal justice system has now been sitting for a year, and in that time it has heard evidence that led to the arrest of senior law enforcement officials.
The Madlanga Commission of Inquiry was established on this date last year to investigate allegations of criminality and corruption in the police, the prosecuting authority and the courts themselves. Its chair, Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga, marked the anniversary by saying the evidence placed before the commission has laid bare serious weaknesses in the system.
“With such a criminal justice system, those criminals who exert undue improper influence on state functionaries will rarely, if ever, answer for their criminal deeds.”
That is the problem the commission was created to confront. Where people with money or connections can reach into the institutions meant to investigate them, cases stall, dockets disappear and prosecutions are never opened. Madlanga put the question plainly, asking how many such people have over the years escaped charges and sanctions.
What the year produced
The commission has not only taken testimony. Senior law enforcement officials have been arrested on the strength of what has emerged in its hearings, which is the clearest sign that the process is producing consequences rather than transcripts.
Madlanga said he trusts the commission’s work will end in results that play a meaningful role in putting mechanisms in place to curb a recurrence of the criminality that has surfaced before him.
That is the point of an inquiry of this kind. It is not only meant to record what went wrong. It is meant to leave behind structures that make the same conduct harder to repeat, and the chair has framed the commission’s value in exactly those terms.
Why the anniversary matters to people outside the system
The criminal justice system is not an abstraction for South Africans. It is the case that never reaches court, the docket that goes missing, the complaint that is never followed up. When influence can be bought inside the institutions that are supposed to be immune to it, the cost falls on the people with the least power to do anything about it.
A commission that names that problem, and whose evidence leads to arrests at senior level, is doing the work it was given. Whether the mechanisms it recommends are actually put in place is the question that will decide whether this year of hearings changes anything for the person waiting on a case number.
The commission continues its work. Its findings and recommendations are expected to be handed to the President when it concludes, and the test of the past year will be what happens to them after that.
Source: eNCA, ‘We trust that justice will be served’: Madlanga Commission marks one year
