Madlanga Commission hearing record
Day 173 of the Madlanga Commission
Witness: Superintendent Elmarie de Beer +1 more
Evidence led by Advocate Thabang Pooe, Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube
The commission came back from recess and turned, for the first time, on the Johannesburg metro police. Its own internal affairs head described a network that runs out past the JMPD into the SAPS and the Hawks, and named a decorated superintendent who retired the month her unit came for him. Then a K9 sergeant played CCTV of a child being taken, and recognised two of the men on his own shift.
The day in brief
What you need to know
- The commission resumed on Tuesday 15 September 2026, a day later than its own 1 September statement had set down, because of prior commitments held by two commissioners. Hearings run to the close of public evidence on 2 October.
- Day 173 opened the JMPD strand: a full sitting day on the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department, led by Advocate Thabang Pooe and Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube, with two serving JMPD officers as witnesses.
- Superintendent Elmarie de Beer, head of the JMPD's internal affairs unit, described an alleged scheme in which officers use unofficial informants to identify businesses moving large sums of cash or trading precious metals, then intercept the cash or the goods.
- Her central point was that it does not stop at the metro police: 'It typically involved collaboration between JMPD officers, SAPS members, Hawks members, and the ultimate buyer and the sellers.'
- She named Superintendent Phineas Manyama of the Tactical Response Unit, described in the department as a celebrated officer, as an implicated official who used departmental resources for his own benefit and made life difficult for officers who would not stand down on his instruction.
- De Beer's evidence is that TRU members are phoned and ordered out of particular areas the moment they enter them: 'What are you doing there? Get out.'
- Manyama retired in April 2026, at the point her unit was preparing disciplinary charges against him. A retirement ends the disciplinary route; it does not end a criminal one.
- De Beer also told the panel that internal affairs investigators are themselves threatened and targeted, and that officers under investigation open grievances against the investigators to escape the underlying case.
- In the afternoon Sergeant Rico van Wyk of the JMPD K9 unit took the stand as a new witness and played CCTV footage of the kidnapping of a child in Johannesburg in 2021, an abduction for which he said R5 million was extorted from the child's father by other suspects.
- Van Wyk told the commission he recognised two of the men in the footage as officers on his own shift: 'I identified two of the individuals depicted therein as Officers Johannes Mokgatle and Zwelibanzi Mgujulwa.' He said neither denied being in the video and neither explained it.
- Mokgatle is not a new name to this commission. He is the JMPD officer whose movements on the day of the Sandhurst raid on murder-accused businessman Katiso 'KT' Molefe have been the subject of earlier evidence, including that he booked off sick and was nonetheless at the scene.
- Van Wyk's attempt to trace a vehicle through a fleet-tracking company ran into an employee, since deceased, who told him there was no data. Justice Madlanga offered the alternative reading from the chair: 'I wanted to say another possibility is that she did not tell you the truth.'
- Away from the chamber on the same day, the National Prosecuting Authority withdrew all charges against suspended national police commissioner General Fannie Masemola, on the National Director of Public Prosecutions' own instruction. See the development on his page.
- Nothing on this page is a finding. Manyama, Mokgatle and Mgujulwa have not answered these allegations on the public record, none of it has been tested in court, and all are presumed innocent.
Full coverage
The day, in depth
Why the metro police, and why now
For fourteen months this commission has been an inquiry into the South African Police Service. The Hawks, Crime Intelligence, the Political Killings Task Team, the national and provincial commissioners: the whole architecture of the national service has been through the room. The Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department has appeared only glancingly, mostly through one officer's movements on the night Katiso 'KT' Molefe was arrested at Sandhurst, and through an anonymous JMPD inspector who testified in camera as Witness K about a theft of precious stones from a Killarney flat. Day 173 made the department the subject. Per the commission's spokesperson Jeremy Michaels, quoted by IOL ahead of the sitting, the panel would 'hear testimony regarding infiltration of the JMPD by criminal networks, and collusion between JMPD officers and criminal syndicates'. That is a wider claim than any single officer's conduct, and the commission chose to open it with the person inside the department whose job is to investigate it.
What internal affairs says the scheme actually is
Superintendent Elmarie de Beer heads the JMPD's internal affairs unit, and her evidence, per Eyewitness News, described a method rather than an incident. Certain officers, she said, work with unofficial informants - people who are not registered sources and whose handling is not recorded - to identify businesses that move large amounts of cash or trade in goods including precious metals. Once a target is identified, the officers intercept either the cash or the goods, using the appearance of a lawful police action to do it. The pattern is familiar to this archive: it is structurally the same allegation Witness K put to the commission on 23 June 2026 about the Killarney sugilite theft, where a falsified seizure form made a robbery look like a seizure. What de Beer added was scale and reach. Per Eyewitness News her formulation was: 'So the conduct is not confined to JMPD based on the cases. It typically involved collaboration between JMPD officers, SAPS members, Hawks members, and the ultimate buyer and the sellers.' That sentence is the reason this day belongs in this inquiry rather than in a municipal disciplinary file. If it is right, the metro police are not a separate problem sitting alongside the national one; they are a node on the same network, with the buyer and the seller of the stolen goods inside the same arrangement as the officers.
Manyama, and the areas the patrols do not enter
The specific allegation de Beer put up concerned the Tactical Response Unit and Superintendent Phineas Manyama. Per Eyewitness News, she identified Manyama as an implicated officer who used departmental resources for his own benefit and who prevented crime patrols from operating in certain parts of the city. Her description of how that works in practice is the detail worth holding on to: 'There are certain areas where TRU members, as soon as they go into those areas, especially where the crime hotspots or the syndicates operate, as soon as JMPD TRU members enter the parameters of that specific area, they are being phoned and told, What are you doing there? Get out.' Per EWN's reporter on the day, the department regarded Manyama as a celebrated officer, and the allegation is that he made life extremely difficult for JMPD members who did not follow his instruction to stand down. Manyama retired in April 2026, at the point at which de Beer's unit was preparing disciplinary charges against him. None of this has been tested. Manyama has not responded on the public record, has been charged with nothing, and is presumed innocent.
The part about the investigators
The evidence that will read worst for the institution is not about any named officer. Per Eyewitness News, de Beer told the commission that internal affairs investigators in the JMPD are threatened and targeted, and she described the mechanism officers use against them: 'The very same officers that we investigate and we charge would be the very same officers that will turn around and open up grievances in order to get away from whatever subject they are being investigated against. A certain number of our investigating officers were targeted, threatened.' She also described complainants who are afraid of the officers they are complaining about. Put those together and the picture is of an internal control function that is outgunned by the thing it is meant to control: witnesses who will not come forward, investigators who are intimidated, and a grievance procedure used as a counter-weapon. That is an institutional finding the commission could make without deciding anything about any individual, and it is the kind of finding that survives into a report.
The afternoon: a video of a child being taken
After the lunch adjournment the commission called a witness it had not heard before. Sergeant Rico van Wyk of the JMPD's K9 unit, per Eyewitness News, was led onto allegations against Warrant Officer Johannes Mokgatle, and the instrument he brought was CCTV footage of a kidnapping in Johannesburg in 2021. A child was taken, and R5 million was allegedly collected from the child's father by other suspects. Van Wyk's evidence was that he watched the recording and recognised people he worked with: 'Upon viewing the video, I identified two of the individuals depicted therein as Officers Johannes Mokgatle and Zwelibanzi Mgujulwa, both of whom were assigned to my shift. I immediately questioned them about the video and sought to establish whether they had been involved in a police operation. Neither officer denied being depicted in the video; however, they remained silent and did not provide any explanation regarding their presence or involvement in the incident depicted in the video.' The care in that answer is worth noting. Van Wyk does not say the two men kidnapped anyone. He says he identified them in footage, asked whether it was a police operation, and got silence. Identification from video is contestable, silence to a colleague is not an admission, and no court has determined any of it. Mokgatle and Mgujulwa are presumed innocent.
The tracking data that was not there
The other half of van Wyk's evidence was about how hard it was to establish anything at all. Per Eyewitness News he described approaching a fleet-tracking company to trace a vehicle's movements and being told by an employee, since deceased, that there was nothing to give him: 'And her feedback was, the unit is not responding, there is no data on the vehicle, the movement of the vehicle.' Advocate Thabang Pooe noted from the bar that the same service provider had supplied information to the commission, which is to say the data existed. It was Justice Madlanga who said the rest out loud: 'I wanted to say another possibility is that she did not tell you the truth.' Van Wyk's answer was careful: 'Possibility is there, Commissioner.' Vehicle tracking has been load-bearing in this record all year, from the AVL bundle now being argued in the Matlala trial-within-a-trial to the movements put to officer after officer in this room. What Day 173 added is that the data can also simply be withheld at the counter, by a person who is now beyond being asked why.
Mokgatle is not a new name
The commission has been circling Johannes Mokgatle since 2025. The allegation on the record, per IOL and eNCA, is that he booked off sick on the day police raided Katiso 'KT' Molefe's Sandhurst home, used an official JMPD vehicle while off duty to travel there anyway, confronted the officers at the scene and tried to disrupt the arrest, and later attempted to interfere with investigators. He was suspended from the K9 unit and the JMPD instituted disciplinary charges. Witness B put a version of the sick-leave allegation to the commission in October 2025. What Day 173 does is add a second, unrelated matter: an abduction in 2021 with a R5 million extortion attached, and a colleague saying he recognised him in the footage. Two separate allegations from two separate years, put up by two separate witnesses, are a different evidential posture from one contested incident. They are still allegations. Mokgatle has not given evidence to this commission, has answered none of this publicly, and is presumed innocent.
And outside the room, the NPA let a police commissioner go
While the JMPD evidence was running, the National Prosecuting Authority announced that the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Advocate Andy Mothibi, had instructed that all charges against suspended national police commissioner General Fannie Masemola be withdrawn. Per SABC News, the NDPP found there were no reasonable prospects of a successful prosecution after considering the investigation, a Case Assessment Panel report and an independent senior counsel's opinion, and the matter will be referred for further scrutiny to establish whether there was misconduct in how the case was assessed, enrolled and handled. Masemola was charged in April 2026 by the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption with contraventions of the Public Finance Management Act arising from the Medicare24 tender, and was suspended by President Cyril Ramaphosa on the strength of it. This commission is part of the reason the charges fell over: it spent July 2026 taking former IDAC head Advocate Andrea Johnson through the legal basis for them, and on 30 July the Sowetan reported her conceding that the decision was not based on any law. The full record is on Masemola's profile and in the development entry for 15 September.
Where the calendar stands
The commission resumed on Tuesday 15 September rather than Monday 14 September. The reason, reported by MDN News before the fact and borne out by the sitting itself, was prior commitments held by two commissioners, made when the inquiry was still expected to conclude in August. The archive published the 14th until the chamber said otherwise, which is the correct posture, and now publishes the 15th. Per Eyewitness News a further new witness was expected on Wednesday 16 September. Ahead of that, Major-General Feroz Khan's outstanding statement is due on 18 September and his evidence is set down for 28 September, Joe 'Ferrari' Sibanyoni returns for cross-examination on 21 September, Vusimuzi 'Cat' Matlala is part-heard for a fourth time and Lieutenant-Colonel Deenadayalan Govender remains part-heard. Public evidence closes on 2 October and the report to the President is due on 16 November 2026.
In their words
Key moments from the record
“So the conduct is not confined to JMPD based on the cases. It typically involved collaboration between JMPD officers, SAPS members, Hawks members, and the ultimate buyer and the sellers.”
“There are certain areas where TRU members, as soon as they go into those areas, especially where the crime hotspots or the syndicates operate, as soon as JMPD TRU members enter the parameters of that specific area, they are being phoned and told, What are you doing there? Get out.”
“The very same officers that we investigate and we charge would be the very same officers that will turn around and open up grievances in order to get away from whatever subject they are being investigated against. A certain number of our investigating officers were targeted, threatened.”
“Upon viewing the video, I identified two of the individuals depicted therein as Officers Johannes Mokgatle and Zwelibanzi Mgujulwa, both of whom were assigned to my shift. I immediately questioned them about the video and sought to establish whether they had been involved in a police operation. Neither officer denied being depicted in the video; however, they remained silent and did not provide any explanation regarding their presence or involvement in the incident depicted in the video.”
“I wanted to say another possibility is that she did not tell you the truth.”
“Possibility is there, Commissioner.”
Our analysis
The bottom line
The most consequential thing said on Day 173 was a clause about who else is in the room. De Beer's evidence is not that the JMPD has bad officers, which no serious person disputes about any police service. It is that the arrangements she investigates routinely involve JMPD officers, SAPS members and Hawks members together with the buyer and the seller of the intercepted goods. If that stands up, it collapses a distinction the record has been quietly relying on all year. The commission has treated municipal policing as adjacent to its mandate. Internal affairs has just told it that the same scheme runs through both, which makes the metro police a part of the national problem rather than a neighbour to it.
Manyama's retirement is the structural fact of the day, and it is not unusual enough. An officer under preparation for disciplinary charges retires, the disciplinary process falls away with the employment relationship, and the file closes without a finding either way. That is not evidence of guilt and it is not a loophole he created. It is a design feature of how public-sector discipline works, and this commission has now seen it operate at least twice: Manyama in April 2026, and the pattern of officers resigning or retiring ahead of process that has run through the record since 2025. A report that wants to change behaviour has to say something about the gap between the end of employment and the end of accountability.
The grievance point deserves more attention than it will get. De Beer describes officers who, on being investigated, lodge grievances against the investigators. That is a procedural inversion: a protection built for employees facing unfair treatment turned into a shield for employees facing evidence. It is hard to legislate against, because the remedy for abuse of a grievance process cannot be the removal of the grievance process. But it explains something the commission keeps encountering and rarely names, which is why internal controls inside South African policing produce so few completed cases.
Van Wyk's evidence was careful in a way that strengthens it. He did not say Mokgatle and Mgujulwa kidnapped a child. He said he identified them in footage, asked them whether it was an operation, and received silence. Read at its lowest, that is one officer's recognition of two colleagues in a low-quality recording, which is exactly the kind of identification evidence courts discount. Read in context, it is a first-hand account of a shift supervisor putting a direct question to two subordinates about a serious crime and getting no answer at all, which is a fact about conduct regardless of what the video shows. The commission does not have to resolve which reading is right; a court, if this is ever charged, will.
Mokgatle is now the JMPD's Sibiya: one name attached to two unrelated matters years apart, each put up by a different witness. In 2021, on van Wyk's evidence, he is in footage of an abduction. In December 2024, on the evidence already before this commission, he books off sick and turns up at the Sandhurst raid on Katiso Molefe in an official vehicle. Neither allegation proves the other. But the commission's interest has never been in isolated misconduct; it is in whether particular officers function as points of contact between a police service and a criminal network. Two separate allegations of exactly that shape, from two separate sources, is why he is still on this board.
Putting the Masemola withdrawal on the same day as the JMPD evidence produces an uncomfortable symmetry the commission did not arrange. In the chamber, an internal affairs head explained why police corruption cases go nowhere: witnesses are afraid, investigators are threatened, suspects retire. Outside it, the NPA withdrew charges against a national police commissioner because there were no reasonable prospects of success, and announced it would investigate how the case came to be brought at all. Both are failures of the same machine, from opposite ends. One is a case that could not be built. The other is a case that should not have been.
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 Superintendent Elmarie de Beer connects to
Superintendent Phineas Manyama
De Beer's Day 173 evidence identified Manyama as an implicated TRU superintendent who used departmental resources for his own benefit and kept crime patrols out of certain areas. He retired in April 2026 as her unit prepared disciplinary charges. Untested; he has not answered publicly and is presumed innocent.
View profile →The second JMPD witness of the same daySergeant Rico van Wyk
De Beer gave evidence in the morning of Day 173 and Sergeant Rico van Wyk of the K9 unit in the afternoon, both led by the same evidence leaders on the same strand: alleged criminal infiltration of the Johannesburg metro police.
View profile →The earlier JMPD insider on the same patternWitness K
Witness K, an anonymous JMPD VIP-unit inspector, testified on 23 June 2026 that a precious-stones theft in Killarney was dressed up as a lawful seizure. De Beer's Day 173 evidence describes the same method as a pattern across cases. Neither account has been tested.
View profile →In the room & on the record
Counsel, the panel and sources
Evidence led by
- Advocate Thabang Pooe
- Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube
On the panel
- Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga (chairperson)
Sources
- EWN - Madlanga Commission: JMPD investigator exposes alleged police syndicate (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- EWN - JMPD internal affairs head tells Madlanga Commission of threats against investigators (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- EWN - JMPD officer presents kidnapping footage at Madlanga Commission (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- EWN - Madlanga Commission: CCTV footage links JMPD officer Mokgatle to R5m kidnapping (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- IOL - LIVE: JMPD bribery claims, Elmarie de Beer testifies at Madlanga Commission (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- Joburg ETC - JMPD internal affairs head testifies as Madlanga Commission probes bribery and gemstone theft (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- Bulletin - Madlanga Commission hears of alleged JMPD interference in drugs pursuit (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- IOL - Madlanga Commission to grill JMPD over alleged bribery, criminal infiltration and corruption (14 Sep 2026) ↗
- eNCA - Madlanga Commission resumes with JMPD under spotlight (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- EWN - Madlanga Commission resumes with focus on JMPD (15 Sep 2026) ↗
- SABC News - NPA withdraws all charges against Masemola (15 Sep 2026) ↗