Day 191 of the Madlanga Commission

The transcript vindicates this archive's decision to hold four things and publish them as open, and it also catches us out once. Paragraph 60 records R50 000 for travel to Durban, not a second R500 000: the four outlets that reported it that way were right and the Mail and Guardian was not. The R400 000 that only Inside Politics carried is real and is the commission's own investigator's note. The McBride allegation that only Inside Politics carried is on the record in Matlala's own words. And the passage this archive described as a disputed 'Fannie' is Sergeant Fannie Nkosi; the most senior police officer in the country is not named anywhere in these 182 pages. That is the fourth day running on which the official record has moved a fact that every bulletin carried the same way, and it is the argument for an archive that waits.

The morning is the more serious story and it got almost no coverage, because an argument between counsel about an email in August does not make a bulletin. What was at stake is whether the commission can use the single most damaging document it holds against this witness. The Dlamini notes are not IDAC's work, which is the whole of Matlala's defence to everything else; they are the commission's own record of what he volunteered in March, and they corroborate the R500 000, the wedding, the impalas and the butchery payments. If the commission ends up accepting that the 27 March consultation was off the record, the chairperson has already undertaken that all of it comes out. The archive should be clear that this is live and unresolved, and that affidavits from both sides are still to come.

On the merits of that dispute the record currently leans one way without settling it. There is no contemporaneous correspondence recording an off-the-record arrangement; the attorney who received a draft affidavit the day after the disputed consultation did not write back to say the contents were off the record; and a two-day consultation attended by an investigator is hard to square with an understanding that nothing said could ever be used. Against that, Ms van den Heever says she acted on instructions and offered to go under oath, which is not nothing, and the person she actually says gave her the assurance, Advocate Hassim, was not in the room to answer. The one thing that was resolved was resolved against her: Advocate Sello was never at the meeting at all, and the chairperson made her say so in public.

The reversal looks worse on the transcript than it did in the reporting, not better. It was not a correction offered; it came after the commission put its own notes, Witness C's recording and two affidavits in front of him, paragraph by paragraph, and after a commissioner told him he was obstructive. And the admission he finally gave has a hole in the middle of it. He confirms the amount, confirms the occasion, confirms it was the first payment, and then declines to say why a man holding a R360 million police contract hands the deputy national commissioner responsible for crime detection half a million rand. A reason withheld is not the same as a reason that does not exist, but a fact-gathering body cannot work with it, which is exactly what Commissioner Baloyi told him.

There is one passage that cuts the other way and it should not be lost in the rest: he agreed, without being pushed, that paragraph 66 is accurate where it says he realised the extortion would not end and refused to buy the plot. That is a man describing himself as a victim of a police officer, in a document he otherwise says was written for him by people who wanted to frame other people. Taken with his refusal to explain the R500 000 on safety grounds, and his evidence that he fears for a family member, it is at least a coherent account: that the payments were extracted rather than offered. It is also the account that would do Lieutenant-General Sibiya the most damage, and Sibiya has denied receiving anything. None of it has been tested, and that is where it stands.

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.