Day 164 of the Madlanga Commission

Day 164 closed the loop on the Crime Intelligence prosecution with a symmetry the commission did not arrange. In one room the complainant conceded he had probably been used; in another, two kilometres away, the state formally released the seven people his complaint put in the dock. Neither event proves the other. But an archive that recorded the arrests owes the same prominence to the withdrawal, and the record now shows a prosecution that ran for fourteen months on a referral its own prosecutor was never shown, its own investigator never held in original form, and its own complainant now says was altered.

The most quietly devastating line of Adams's evidence was not about him. It was that he did not know Brigadier Dineo Mokwele's name when he laid the complaint - he knew her as 'the BMW lady'. Mokwele was arrested, charged with fraud and corruption, and spent more than a year as an accused person on the strength of an appointment complaint brought by a man who could not name her. Whatever the commission ultimately finds about who steered the case, that fact belongs in the record on its own.

Adams's credibility is now a matter for two forums rather than one, and he put it there himself. Commissioner Baloyi's formulation - that one of Parliament's ad hoc committee or this commission must hold him to have lied under oath - is not rhetoric; both are statutory bodies before which he gave sworn evidence, and the accounts cannot both stand. He has chosen to characterise the parliamentary version as the mistaken one. That is the answer with the fewest consequences here and the most consequences there.

Govender's evidence changes the shape of the KwaZulu-Natal phase rather than resolving it. Until Friday the province's task-team allegations ran in one direction: IPID and a bereaved family alleging that a police unit killed for money. Govender's answer is a counter-allegation of the same class as the ones the commission has been hearing about IDAC all month - that a minister tried to script a witness. If it is true, it is evidence of political interference of exactly the kind the terms of reference name. If it is not, it is a serving officer accused of murder-for-hire attempting to convert himself into a whistleblower. The commission has no basis yet to prefer either reading, and nothing in his denial answers the bank records.

There is a pattern worth naming across the two halves of the day. Three separate witnesses have now told this commission that someone tried to steer their evidence: Advocate Drushantha Ramsamy on IDAC's leadership, Advocate Peter Serunye on being urged to proceed against his own written advice, and now Lieutenant-Colonel Govender on the police minister. The allegations differ in weight and in reliability, and each is untested. But the commission's terms of reference are about interference in the criminal justice system, and interference in what witnesses say is the most direct form of it there is.

What the archive still does not have, after four scheduled days with Adams, is the substance he promised. Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi's allegation that Adams held Crime Intelligence material he was not entitled to remains unanswered on the record. So does the question of who put the envelope under the door. Adams has now been released from the stand, which means those answers, if they come, will have to come from someone else.

Analysis is the archive’s own comment on the public proceedings, grounded in the record above. It weighs the evidence and the process; questions of individual guilt are for the courts and the commission to decide. Everyone named is presumed innocent.