Madlanga Commission hearing record
Day 171 of the Madlanga Commission
Witness: Lieutenant General Seswantsho Godfrey Lebeya
Evidence led by Advocate Adila Hassim SC, Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube
The man the commission has been trying to put in the witness box since June still did not come, and the reason he gave collapsed into a document. Then the day went back to a walk-in safe in Port Shepstone, where 541 kilograms of cocaine vanished behind broken cameras, and to two retired generals whose accounts of who knew it was there cannot both be true.
The day in brief
What you need to know
- Suspended Crime Intelligence deputy head Major-General Feroz Khan was subpoenaed to appear at the Brigitte Mabandla Justice College on Tuesday 1 September 2026 and did not appear. Only his legal team came. It is the latest in a run of non-appearances stretching back to 1 July 2026, when he was in hospital after being shot.
- The postponement application was not decided on his health. It was decided on a piece of paper. Per the Mail & Guardian and TimesLIVE, evidence leader Advocate Adila Hassim SC produced an affidavit from Khan's treating doctor, Dr Fine, saying he had altered a medical certificate at the request of Khan's son.
- The original certificate, dated 22 May 2026, said Khan would be fit to return to work on 30 June. A version produced on 20 August moved that to 27 June and added a diagnosis of extreme stress, depression and anxiety. The doctor said he warned that changing a certificate already submitted could amount to fraud, and was told it had not been submitted.
- Hassim said the police records showed it had already been submitted, and that what SAPS had asked Khan for was more information about his diagnosis, not a different date. Per The Citizen, her assessment was four words: 'It was a lie.'
- Chairperson Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga refused to grant the postponement outright. He adopted the mechanism the commission used with Suleiman Carrim: Khan's evidence stands postponed to Monday 28 September 2026 at 09:30, and he is excused from appearing then only if, by 8 September, he voluntarily submits to an independent medical specialist agreed between his representatives and the evidence leaders, and that specialist reports that he cannot testify. His outstanding statement is due by 18 September.
- Khan's counsel had resisted an independent examination, raising a 'white coat effect' and warning of 'a further cascade of the current condition that is recorded in the latest report'. The commission required his general condition to be disclosed while allowing the clinical detail to stay confidential.
- With the ruling delivered, retired Hawks national head Lieutenant General Godfrey Lebeya resumed for his second appearance, and evidence leader Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube moved him off the Sandhurst arrest and onto the roughly 541kg of cocaine, worth about R200 million, seized at Durban harbour in 2021 and later stolen from a walk-in safe at the Hawks' Port Shepstone offices.
- Lebeya said he did not know where the consignment had been stored until after it was gone: 'I can't recall him informing me as to where he has stored the drugs.' Major General Lesetja Senona told this commission the opposite - that he had told Lebeya the Port Shepstone offices had safely stored a large quantity before.
- Segeels-Ncube put the fork to him: 'Because it's either that General Senona is lying, or you're lying, or you're both mistaken about what transpired.' Lebeya declined to call his former subordinate a liar: 'I cannot say Senona had lied.'
- The commission heard that the CCTV cameras and alarms at the Port Shepstone office were not working, that there was no round-the-clock guard, and that firearms stored in the same place were left untouched - the point being that whoever took the cocaine wanted only the cocaine.
- Senona had members down to the cleaners polygraphed after the theft and was never polygraphed himself, on evidence that he held keys to the safe room. Lebeya's answer was that disciplining a provincial head's own conduct sat with the supervisory line, and that he had ordered both a fact-finding inquiry and a criminal investigation.
- Nothing on this page is a finding. The allegations about the certificate, the theft and the storage decision are untested, no court has determined any of them, and everyone named is presumed innocent.
Full coverage
The day, in depth
The witness who was not there, and the paper that was
The commission has been trying to hear Feroz Khan since 1 July 2026. He was shot in Houghton on the night of 28 June, days before his first date, and the appearances have slipped ever since on medical grounds. On Tuesday morning the subpoena was in force, the roll had him on it, and he did not come. Only his lawyers did. What made the day different from the previous postponements is that the commission no longer had to weigh a doctor's note against its own timetable, because the note itself had become the evidence. Per the Mail & Guardian and TimesLIVE, Advocate Adila Hassim SC put before the panel an affidavit from Khan's treating physician, Dr Fine, in which the doctor stated that he had altered a medical certificate at the request of Khan's son. The original certificate, dated 22 May 2026, recorded that Khan would be fit to resume duty on 30 June. The version produced on 20 August moved that date to 27 June and carried an added diagnosis of extreme stress, depression and anxiety. On the doctor's own account he cautioned that amending a certificate already submitted to an employer could constitute fraud, and was told by the son, after the son checked with Khan, that it had not been submitted. Hassim told the commission the police records showed it had. She also said the request SAPS had actually made of Khan was for more information about his diagnosis, not for the date to be changed. Her characterisation, per The Citizen, was 'it was a lie'. None of this has been tested. Khan has not answered it from the witness box, the doctor has not been cross-examined on his affidavit, and no criminal or professional process has determined anything. Both are presumed innocent.
Why the commission would not simply take the certificate
Hassim's argument against the postponement was not that Khan is well. It was that the commission cannot keep outsourcing the question to documents produced by the person who benefits from them. Per EWN she put the public interest in the appearance rather than in the diagnosis: the commission's concern 'is not an interest in General Khan's health as such - it's an interest in understanding why a senior public officer who is under a compulsory process' should be relieved of the obligation to answer. Her fix followed from the affidavit: the point of an independent examination, she said, is 'to emphasise the importance of the independent medical evaluation of the patient himself' rather than resting on the treating doctors. Khan's team resisted precisely that. They argued a medical condition existed, proposed that any assessment run through his own physician to protect his privacy, and raised what they called a 'white coat effect' - the contention that being examined by a stranger appointed by the other side could itself worsen his state and produce 'a further cascade of the current condition that is recorded in the latest report'. That is a real clinical argument in the abstract. Its difficulty on Tuesday was that it asked the commission to rely on the treating relationship in the same sitting in which a treating doctor had sworn that the paperwork from that relationship had been altered on a family member's request.
The ruling, and the Carrim template
Justice Madlanga did not grant the postponement on the papers and did not force Khan into an examination either. He built a conditional structure and borrowed it openly from the Suleiman Carrim matter, where the commission faced a witness whose repeated non-appearance rested on medical grounds. The terms, per SABC News and the Mail & Guardian: Khan's evidence is postponed to Monday 28 September 2026 at 09:30. He must file his outstanding statement by 18 September - the chairperson refusing, in the reporting, to allow an open-ended delay on the statement. He will be excused from appearing on 28 September only if, by no later than 8 September, he voluntarily undergoes an evaluation by an independent medical specialist agreed between his representatives and the commission's evidence leaders, and only if that specialist reports that he is unable to testify on the day. His general condition must be disclosed to the commission; the underlying clinical detail may remain confidential, which is the concession his team asked for and got. The design is worth stating plainly, because it is the commission's answer to a problem it has had all year: it does not compel a man to be examined, and it does not accept a certificate at face value. It makes the postponement the thing he has to earn, on terms both sides pick together, inside seven days.
The other case running in parallel, and what it has already decided
The commission is not the only forum Khan is fighting on. The day before, Monday 31 August 2026, Labour Court Judge Connie Prinsloo struck his urgent application off the roll for want of jurisdiction, alternatively want of urgency, and ordered his union, the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union, to pay the costs. Per The Citizen and Business Day, the application sought to stop the SAPS disciplinary process against him and challenged the role of KwaZulu-Natal district commissioner Jabulani Khumalo as chair of it. The disciplinary went ahead without him and, per TimesLIVE, produced a finding of guilt on misconduct and bringing the police service into disrepute, with a recommendation that dismissal is the appropriate sanction. So the position on Tuesday morning was a man under subpoena to a commission of inquiry, facing a recommendation that he be dismissed from the police, a stayed arrest warrant in a separate illicit-precious-metals matter in Kempton Park, and a medical account that had just been contradicted by his own doctor's affidavit. The recommendation is a recommendation and not a dismissal; the disciplinary finding is an internal employment outcome and not a criminal conviction; and none of it decides the allegations before this commission. Khan is presumed innocent of all of it.
Back to Port Shepstone: 541 kilograms and a room where the cameras did not work
With the Khan matter parked until 28 September, the day returned to the witness who had been waiting in the building. Lieutenant General Godfrey Lebeya, who led the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation from 2018 until his retirement in 2025, was in his second appearance after opening on 27 August, and evidence leader Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube took him away from the Sandhurst arrest of Katiso Molefe and onto the case this commission has been circling since May 2026. In 2021 roughly 541 kilograms of cocaine, put at about R200 million, was seized at Durban harbour. It was then stored not in a police evidence store or a forensic laboratory but in a walk-in safe at the Hawks' Serious Organised Crime offices in Port Shepstone, and from there it disappeared. The physical picture the commission has assembled is the reason nobody treats this as a burglary: per the Sowetan the CCTV cameras and the alarms at the office were not working, there was no twenty-four-hour guard, and firearms held in the same place were left where they were. Whoever went in went in for the cocaine and knew where it was.
Two generals, one conversation, and only one of them can be right
The specific question Segeels-Ncube put to Lebeya was narrow and unavoidable: did you know the drugs were in Port Shepstone before they were stolen? Lebeya's answer, per the Mail & Guardian, was that he did not: 'I can't recall him informing me as to where he has stored the drugs. So that is the view that I had, that he did not inform me.' That collides with what Major General Lesetja Senona, then the provincial head of the KwaZulu-Natal Hawks and the man who directed that the drugs be taken there, told this same commission. Senona's evidence, quoted back to Lebeya, was that he had raised it with his national head: 'I then told [Lebeya] the Port Shepstone offices had previously safely stored a large quantity.' Segeels-Ncube did not soften the consequence. Per the African News Agency he put it as a three-way fork: 'Because it's either that General Senona is lying, or you're lying, or you're both mistaken about what transpired.' Lebeya took the third door and would not go further: 'I cannot say Senona had lied.' Neither man has been found to have misled the commission. The contradiction is on the record; the resolution of it is not.
The polygraph that was never taken
The second strand Segeels-Ncube pressed was the aftermath. On the evidence before the commission, once the cocaine was found to be gone Senona had the Hawks members who had been involved in transporting it polygraphed - and, per the Sowetan, the net went down as far as cleaners - while he himself was never polygraphed, on evidence that he was the officer who had directed the storage and who held keys to the safe room. Segeels-Ncube asked why the national head had allowed that. Lebeya's answer was structural rather than personal: Senona was the supervisor who ran the disciplinary process at provincial level, and the accountability for a provincial head's own conduct ran up the supervisory line rather than through the process he was himself administering. He said that on learning of the theft he ordered two things - a fact-finding investigation and a criminal investigation - and, per the Sowetan, noted that the provincial officers had never asked for the drugs to be fast-tracked to a forensic laboratory, which is where they should have gone. The archive has carried Senona's own answer on the polygraph question since his January and June 2026 appearances; it now carries his former national head's account alongside it. Neither has been tested against the other in any forum with the power to decide.
The clock behind all of it
Tuesday was the second-to-last public sitting before a pause. The commission announced that it goes into recess from Thursday 3 September to 11 September 2026, seven working days, with the last day of public hearings on Wednesday 2 September and hearings resuming on Monday 14 September. Per SAnews and the Mail & Guardian, spokesperson Jeremy Michaels said the break is necessary so that two commissioners can honour commitments they made when the commission was expected to have finished its work by 31 August 2026 - the deadline that has since moved. The senior team continues working through the recess. The report to President Cyril Ramaphosa is due on 16 November 2026 and public evidence closes on 2 October. Set against that calendar, the Khan ruling is doing more work than it looks: 28 September is four days before evidence closes. If the independent specialist route runs its course and he is excused again, the commission will have used its last ordinary sitting window on a witness it has never heard.
In their words
Key moments from the record
“It was a lie.”
“It is not an interest in General Khan's health as such. It's an interest in understanding why a senior public officer who is under a compulsory process.”
“This is to emphasise the importance of the independent medical evaluation of the patient himself.”
“A further cascade of the current condition that is recorded in the latest report.”
“I can't recall him informing me as to where he has stored the drugs. So that is the view that I had, that he did not inform me.”
“Because it's either that General Senona is lying, or you're lying, or you're both mistaken about what transpired.”
“I cannot say Senona had lied.”
“I then told [Lebeya] the Port Shepstone offices had previously safely stored a large quantity.”
Our analysis
The bottom line
The Khan ruling is the most consequential procedural decision the commission has taken in weeks, and it is worth being precise about what it does. It does not compel a man to submit to a medical examination, which the commission has no power to do. It does not accept a certificate, which is the thing that has failed here repeatedly. It makes the excuse conditional on a jointly chosen specialist, sets the deadline for that inside seven days, and separates the statement from the appearance so that the written evidence lands on 18 September whether or not he takes the stand on 28 September. That is the Carrim template applied a second time, and the commission now has a repeatable answer to the medical postponement.
The affidavit from the treating doctor changes the character of the argument. Until Tuesday the commission's difficulty with Khan was epistemic: it could not know how ill he was, and it was being asked to take a document on trust. After Tuesday the difficulty is different and worse for him, because a document produced on his side of the record has been sworn to have been altered on a family member's request. That is not a finding against Khan - the request came from his son on the doctor's account, and Khan has answered none of it - but it is why the panel would not simply take the latest report at its word.
There is a structural point about the 'white coat effect' argument that the commission did not have to reach and probably will not. If a witness's condition is such that an independent examination would worsen it, the same logic ought to apply with greater force to giving evidence under cross-examination, which is what the independent examination is being used to postpone. The argument, taken to its end, is not an argument for a delay to 28 September; it is an argument that he can never be heard. The commission's ruling avoids deciding that by putting the question to a doctor both sides agree on.
On the Port Shepstone strand, the archive should be careful about what today added. It did not resolve who knew the drugs were there. It established that the two most senior officers in the chain have given the commission accounts that cannot both be true, and that the evidence leader said so out loud. What made Lebeya's answer notable is what he would not do with it: offered the opportunity to say his former provincial head lied, he declined, and left the contradiction sitting where it is. A retired national head refusing to characterise his subordinate's evidence is defensible restraint. It is also, in a commission whose whole subject is what senior officers do and do not say about each other, a data point.
The physical evidence is the part that resists every innocent reading. A walk-in safe with cameras that did not work, alarms that did not work and no night guard is a security failure. Firearms left untouched in the same room while 541 kilograms of cocaine went out is not a security failure - it is a selection. That is why the polygraph question has weight beyond bureaucracy: if the theft points inward, then a process that tested the cleaners and never tested the officer who chose the storage site and held the keys is the shape of the problem, not the response to it.
The recess frames everything. Public evidence closes on 2 October and the report is due on 16 November. Between 3 and 11 September the commission is dark. Khan's new date of 28 September leaves four sitting days of margin before evidence closes, and he is not the only person the record still needs: Lebeya is part-heard again, Vusimuzi Matlala is part-heard for a fourth time, Deenadayalan Govender is part-heard, and Joe Sibanyoni's cross-examination is set down for 21 September. The commission has more part-heard witnesses than it has weeks.
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.
Follow the threads
Who Lieutenant General Seswantsho Godfrey Lebeya connects to
Katiso 'KT' Molefe
Lebeya is alleged to have caused Hawks units to be deployed to Molefe's Sandhurst home during his arrest on 6 December 2024. On Day 168 he denied knowing Molefe at all and said he was contacted by a third party. Untested; both are presumed innocent.
View profile →The general he says should have told himLieutenant-General Dumisani Khumalo
On Day 168 Lebeya said the obligation to inform the national head of the operation to arrest Molefe sat with the provincial commissioner in consultation with Khumalo, and that he was never told. Khumalo has not answered that account before the commission; untested, both presumed innocent.
View profile →The complaint he took to the NDPPAdvocate Andrea Johnson
Evidence in July 2026 was that a misconduct complaint about Johnson reached Lebeya, who put it to then NDPP Shamila Batohi and asked for an independent prosecutor. On Day 168 Lebeya confirmed he discussed the allegations with Batohi. Untested; Johnson denies the surrounding allegations and is presumed innocent.
View profile →The other side of the Sandhurst operationLieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi
The 6 December 2024 arrest was carried out by the KwaZulu-Natal Political Killings Task Team, the unit at the centre of Lieutenant General Mkhwanazi's July 2025 allegations and of this commission's mandate. Lebeya's evidence is that the Hawks were verifying an impostor claim, not interfering. Untested.
View profile →His provincial head, and now his contradictionMajor General Lesetja Senona
Senona ran the KwaZulu-Natal Hawks while Lebeya was national head, and directed that the seized cocaine be stored at Port Shepstone. On Day 171 Lebeya said he was never told where it was; Senona's evidence to this commission is that he told him. Evidence leader Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube put it that one of them must be lying or both mistaken; Lebeya would not say Senona had lied. No finding has been made on either account and both are presumed innocent.
View profile →In the room & on the record
Counsel, the panel and sources
Evidence led by
- Advocate Adila Hassim SC
- Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube
On the panel
- Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga (chairperson)
Sources
- Mail & Guardian - Khan's sick-note saga delays his testimony at Madlanga commission (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- The Citizen - 'It was a lie': Feroz Khan's doctored sick note in the spotlight at Madlanga commission (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- TimesLIVE - How sick note Maj-Gen Khan submitted to police was backdated (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- SABC News - Commission orders independent medical assessment for Feroz Khan (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- EWN - Madlanga Commission evidence leaders push back against Feroz Khan's latest delay bid (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- The Citizen - Feroz Khan loses Labour Court bid as Madlanga commission testimony hangs in the balance (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- Business Day - Suspended Khan loses bid to halt police disciplinary case (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- TimesLIVE - Feroz Khan takes SAPS to Labour Court as disciplinary process recommends his dismissal (29 Aug 2026) ↗
- Mail & Guardian - Lebeya 'can't recall' being told where 541kg cocaine haul was stored (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- Sowetan - Madlanga inquiry quizzes Lt-Gen on R200m cocaine stolen from Hawks office (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- Sowetan - Madlanga: Five things to know about R200m drug theft and Feroz Khan's sick note (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- African News Agency - 'Either Senona is lying or you are': Lebeya grilled over R200m cocaine (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- SABC News - Lebeya denies knowing about drug storage facility in Port Shepstone (1 Sep 2026) ↗
- SAnews - Madlanga Commission to go into short recess (1 Sep 2026) ↗