Madlanga Commission hearing record
Day 194 of the Madlanga Commission
Witness: Warrant Officer Phuti Eric Mashala +2 more
Evidence led by Advocate Thabang Pooe, Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube
Three witnesses, one department, and a pattern the commission has been circling since September. A Hawks investigator conceded he told a suspected bribe-broker about his own entrapment operation and the chairperson took him apart for it; two JMPD constables then described a retired superintendent who they say called off a chase by telephone and told officers to take whatever bribes were offered. Nobody named has answered any of it here, and all are presumed innocent.
The day in brief
What you need to know
- NOTHING ON THIS PAGE IS A FINDING. Superintendent Phineas Manyama retired from the JMPD in April 2026, has given no evidence to this commission, has answered none of these allegations publicly and has been charged with nothing. Chief Superintendent Tintswalo Rikhotso, Captain Mabunda of the Hawks and Inspector Emma Phakoane have answered nothing on this record either, and all are presumed innocent. The only conviction mentioned on this page belongs to the criminal courts, not to this commission.
- THE OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT FOR THIS DAY IS NOT YET PUBLISHED, and the official hearings table reaches only Day 192 as this page is written. The day number comes from SABC News, the broadcaster the commission's own rows link for official video, which headed its live page and its reporting Day 194. Expect this page to be rewritten from the record, because on the last four occasions the transcript moved something that every outlet had carried identically.
- THE MORNING WAS NOT ABOUT A ROBBERY, IT WAS ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THE INVESTIGATION. Warrant Officer Phuti Eric Mashala of the Hawks investigated the theft of R1.5 million in cash from the businessman Nawazish Ali Raja during a roadside stop on Crownwood Road in August 2023. The JMPD officer who took it, Eric Mphahlele, has been convicted. What the commission wanted to know was why nobody else was.
- HE TOLD THE SUSPECTED BRIBE-BROKER ABOUT HIS OWN ENTRAPMENT OPERATION. On the evidence Mashala and Captain N.J. Tauatswala met Mphahlele at a Sasol garage on 14 August 2023 and were offered R250 000 to make the docket disappear, arranged through a senior JMPD officer and with a Hawks captain named Mabunda to hand the cash over. They applied to run it under section 252A of the Criminal Procedure Act. Then, believing Mabunda was part of the scheme, they briefed her on it and invited her to turn.
- THE CHAIRPERSON DID NOT LET IT PASS, and the exchange is carried near-identically by SABC News, the IOL network, The Citizen and Inside Politics. Justice Madlanga: 'That's a very glaring mistake by Hawks detectives.' 'You are supposed to be a specialised branch of the police, aren't you?' 'I would even say you are supposed to be super detectives, aren't you?' Mashala: 'Yes, we are.' Madlanga: 'You are defeating the very purpose of what you sought to achieve.' 'Just doesn't make sense at all to me. Does it make sense to you?' Mashala: 'No, Your Worship.'
- HE CONCEDED THE ERROR BUT NOT THE CONSEQUENCE. Per the IOL network and Inside Politics, Mashala said 'It might be where we made a mistake in telling her', while maintaining that the operation would have collapsed anyway because Mabunda would have warned the others. Madlanga's answer, per the IOL network: 'All of this ends up being totally inconclusive. And in my book, I would say you were responsible for that.'
- THE COMMISSIONERS WENT FURTHER THAN THE CHAIR. Per Inside Politics, Commissioner Advocate Sandile Khumalo SC put it as sabotage: 'It looks like you and your colleagues sabotaged the whole 252 operation because the money was there', and 'all she had to do was give it to you and you arrest her'. Commissioner Advocate Sesi Baloyi SC asked why, at the point Mabunda was understood to be holding the money, the investigators were still discussing recruiting her into the operation rather than arresting her.
- AN AFFIDAVIT ARRIVED ON THE DAY. Per Inside Politics the commission received an affidavit from Inspector Emma Phakoane confirming that about R500 000 was handed to Mabunda. Superintendent Elmarie de Beer's evidence on Day 173 was that Phakoane allegedly offered a Hawks officer R550 000 to secure Mphahlele's release. The two figures are not the same and this archive does not reconcile them.
- THE AFTERNOON RETURNED TO THE OFFICER DAY 173 NAMED. Constable Malibongwe Cutalele of the Tactical Response Unit described a pursuit on 3 July 2025: an unmarked JMPD vehicle following a black Ford Ranger off the M1 South, blue lights and siren, the car running a red light, a SAPS helicopter overhead, and then Superintendent Manyama on the telephone ordering the chase abandoned and the officers to meet him at a filling station on the R82 near the Lido Hotel. They complied.
- WHAT IT COSTS TO REFUSE, IN HIS OWN WORDS. Per Inside Politics, Cutalele on why he did not ask for a reason: 'I only thought of obeying the instructions from my superintendent.' On what would have happened had he refused: 'It would have been very difficult, Commissioner. Sometimes you can even be taken out of the unit.' On the man himself: 'He's one of those people who are very, very loud, especially when he's addressing you.' And on the job: 'This industry is not an easy one, especially if the instruction comes from someone who's above.'
- THE PANEL DID NOT SPARE HIM EITHER. The chairperson asked why nobody told the helicopter crew and the SAPS reaction channel that the pursuit had been called off, and Cutalele conceded he had not thought of it. Two colleagues in the vehicle, Constables T.P. Mehala and T.T. Moloko, gave statements that per Inside Politics largely supported his account and later lodged a grievance against Manyama; Cutalele was not part of it and does not know its outcome.
- THE THIRD WITNESS WAS THE SHARPEST AND HE APPEARED REMOTELY. Constable Michael Potsane told the commission that Manyama instructed officers not to run drug busts without him, and ordered them to release suspects and accept whatever bribes were offered, with a warning about their safety if they refused. The allegation is that a unit commander converted narcotics enforcement into a toll gate. It is untested and Manyama has not answered it.
- SEVENTEEN BRICKS, A MANSION, AND A SURNAME THE COMMISSION WILL NOT YET EXPLAIN. Per SABC News, Potsane described a July 2025 arrest near the Palm Continental Hotel in Mayfair, five bricks of suspected cocaine and a pistol in the car, and a cooperating suspect who led officers to an unfinished house in Lakewood Estate where seventeen more were found in a storage room, 'packed in medium-sized boxes lined with white foam'. Evidence leader Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube told the panel the registered owner of the mansion carries the surname Matlala, that the commission has not established whether that person is related to Vusimuzi 'Cat' Matlala, and that the name is withheld because it is unclear whether the owner knew what the property was being used for. This archive names nobody on that basis.
- HELD, SINGLE-OUTLET, NOT RELIED ON: the Phakoane affidavit and the R500 000 figure (Inside Politics alone); the identification of the second suspect found inside the Lakewood Estate house (SABC News alone); and the detail that Manyama once reprimanded officers for stopping the city mayor's vehicle (Inside Politics alone). The Hawks captain's first name is given as Keshi by SABC News and as Matimu by Inside Politics, so this page uses the surname only.
Full coverage
The day, in depth
Why the commission keeps coming back to the metro police
This is the fourth sitting this archive records on the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department, and the strand has a shape. It opened on Day 173, 15 September 2026, with Superintendent Elmarie de Beer, who heads the department's internal affairs unit, describing officers using unregistered informants to find businesses holding cash or precious metals and then intercepting the goods under the appearance of lawful police action, and saying the conduct does not stop at the metro: 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 as an implicated officer who kept patrols out of particular areas and who retired in April 2026 as her unit prepared disciplinary charges. She also described the case of a JMPD officer named Mphahlele, convicted of robbing a businessperson of R1.5 million in 2023 under the guise of a police operation, and alleged that an inspector still employed by the department had offered a Hawks officer R550 000 to secure his release. Day 194 takes both of those threads and puts the people inside them on the stand. The morning is the Mphahlele case seen from the Hawks side. The afternoon is Manyama seen from below, through two constables who took his telephone calls.
The robbery, which is the least interesting part of the morning
In August 2023 a JMPD officer, Eric Mphahlele, driving a marked departmental Golf, stopped a grey Mercedes-Benz on Crownwood Road in Johannesburg. The businessman Nawazish Ali Raja and his wife were carrying R1.5 million in cash to buy stock. On Raja's account, reported by the IOL network and Inside Politics, Mphahlele accused him of speeding, found the bag, accused him of money laundering, said he would arrest and handcuff him and then did not, took the cash to the patrol vehicle, told the couple to follow him to Johannesburg Central Police Station after first naming Booysens, and drove off into traffic. Raja said he heard Mphahlele tell a woman on the telephone that he had found the money. Warrant Officer Phuti Eric Mashala of the Hawks was told about the complaint on 12 August 2023 by Captain N.J. Tauatswala, and the two of them took the case. On 18 August 2023 Raja and his wife identified Mphahlele at an identity parade at Hillbrow Police Station. Mphahlele was convicted. That much is settled, and the commission moved past it quickly, because a convicted officer is not the problem this inquiry was created to examine.
The bribe, the section 252A application, and the sentence that undid it
Four days after the robbery, on 14 August 2023, Mashala and Tauatswala met Mphahlele at a Sasol garage. On Mashala's evidence he was offered R250 000 to make the docket disappear. The offer, as the day's evidence described it, did not come from Mphahlele alone: a senior JMPD officer, Chief Superintendent Tintswalo Rikhotso, is said to have arranged it, and a Hawks captain named Mabunda was to hand the money over. The two investigators applied to run the matter as an entrapment operation under section 252A of the Criminal Procedure Act, the provision that lets officers play along with a bribe in order to catch the parties in the act. Then they did the thing the chairperson spent the morning on. Believing Mabunda was herself part of the scheme, they told her about the operation and proposed that she turn and join it, with the understanding that she would be arrested when she produced the cash. Mashala's own account of the sequence, per Inside Politics: he suspected Inspector Emma Phakoane, Mphahlele's supervisor, was directly involved, 'because over the phone, she could give the directive to the officer, Eric Mphahlele, in the very same car that was used', and investigators nonetheless told her about the planned operation. Whichever officer was told, the effect was the same. The operation produced nothing.
The chairperson takes the specialised branch apart
The exchange is the reason this day was covered at all, and four outlets carry it in nearly the same words. Justice Madlanga: 'You are supposed to be a specialised branch of the police, aren't you?' Then: 'I would even say you are supposed to be super detectives, aren't you?' Mashala: 'Yes, we are.' Madlanga: 'You are defeating the very purpose of what you sought to achieve.' And: 'Just doesn't make sense at all to me. Does it make sense to you?' Mashala: 'No, Your Worship.' The chairperson's characterisation, per SABC News and the IOL network, was 'That's a very glaring mistake by Hawks detectives', and his conclusion, per the IOL network, was that 'All of this ends up being totally inconclusive. And in my book, I would say you were responsible for that.' Per Inside Politics he also pressed Mashala on why his written statement did not say plainly that the investigators believed Mabunda already had the money in hand, and Mashala could not explain the omission. The commissioners were harder than the chair. Per Inside Politics, Commissioner Advocate Sandile Khumalo SC: 'It looks like you and your colleagues sabotaged the whole 252 operation because the money was there', and 'all she had to do was give it to you and you arrest her'. Commissioner Advocate Sesi Baloyi SC asked why, at that point, the investigators were still discussing recruiting her. Mashala conceded the mistake and contested its effect, arguing that Mabunda would have alerted the others in any event. Per Inside Politics, Rikhotso, Mabunda and Phakoane all remain in their posts. None of them has been convicted of anything and all are presumed innocent.
A chase called off by telephone
The afternoon belonged to the Tactical Response Unit. Constable Malibongwe Michael Cutalele told the commission that on 3 July 2025 he and two colleagues were patrolling the M1 South towards Gold Reef City in an unmarked JMPD vehicle when they saw a black Ford Ranger with darkly tinted windows take an off-ramp without indicating. They followed it to a McDonald's parking area, then to a Toyota dealership, then towards Southgate Mall, and put on blue lights and a siren. The Ranger slowed, then accelerated away, driving, on his account, recklessly and through a red light. They called for help on the SAPS reaction channel and a helicopter was dispatched. Then Superintendent Phineas Manyama telephoned. Cutalele dropped the first call: 'I dropped his call because we were in the middle of a chase and I needed to make contact with SAPS.' Manyama called back, shouted, and asked what the officers wanted from the people in the vehicle. 'He instructed us to abandon the chase and meet him at Total Petrol Station on R82 near Lido Hotel.' They went. At the meeting Manyama said he was unhappy with their conduct and, on Cutalele's evidence, did not explain why they should not have continued, saying something about concern for their safety without saying what he meant. Cutalele denied that Manyama suggested he knew who was in the Ranger. The chairperson asked the question the panel had been circling: why did nobody tell the helicopter crew and the SAPS officers that the pursuit was off? Cutalele admitted he had not thought of it.
What a junior officer says it costs to ask a question
The most useful evidence Cutalele gave was not about the Ford Ranger. It was about the mechanics of obedience inside a metro police unit, and it answers something de Beer raised in September about why misconduct inside the JMPD does not surface. Asked why he simply complied, per Inside Politics: 'I only thought of obeying the instructions from my superintendent.' Asked what would have followed a refusal: 'It would have been very difficult, Commissioner. Sometimes you can even be taken out of the unit.' Asked about Manyama's manner: 'He's one of those people who are very, very loud, especially when he's addressing you', and per YFM, 'Superintendent Manyama is known by everyone at JMPD that he is always shouting.' His summary of the position a junior officer is in: 'This industry is not an easy one, especially if the instruction comes from someone who's above.' Two of the officers in the vehicle with him, Constables T.P. Mehala and T.T. Moloko, gave statements that Advocate Thabang Pooe placed on the record and which per Inside Politics largely corroborate his account; they later lodged a grievance against Manyama, which Cutalele did not join and whose outcome he does not know. De Beer's September evidence was that complaints against Manyama were abandoned when he retired. Cutalele also described, per Inside Politics, an earlier occasion on which Manyama reprimanded officers who had stopped the city mayor's vehicle; that detail rests on one outlet and is held.
Seventeen bricks in a storage room
Constable Michael Potsane, also of the Tactical Response Unit, testified remotely, and his evidence is the most serious of the three because it describes an instruction rather than an irregularity. Per YFM and SABC News he told the commission that Manyama had told officers not to handle drug busts without him, and that he ordered them to release suspects and to accept whatever bribes were offered, warning that their lives could be in danger if they refused. The case he used to show it was a July 2025 operation. Per SABC News, under the byline of Sibahle Motha, Potsane's team arrested a man named Abdul Hussein near the Palm Continental Hotel in Mayfair; five bricks of suspected cocaine and a pistol were allegedly found in his car. Hussein agreed to cooperate and took officers to an unfinished mansion in Lakewood Estate, where he said he had collected the drugs, and where officers found seventeen more bricks in a storage room: 'The bricks were packed in medium-sized boxes lined with white foam', with two to a box. A second suspect was found inside the house. Evidence leader Advocate Lee Segeels-Ncube then drew the connection that made the day's news, and did it carefully. The mansion's registered owner carries the surname Matlala. The commission has not established whether that person is related to Vusimuzi 'Cat' Matlala, who finished five appearances before this commission three days ago. The owner's name is withheld because it is not clear they knew what the property was being used for. Per SABC News the evidence leader also drew a similarity between the suspected cocaine in this bust and the 'Prestige' branded bricks shown in a video during Matlala's own testimony. A surname is not a connection, and this archive publishes it as the open question the evidence leader framed it as.
In their words
Key moments from the record
“You are supposed to be a specialised branch of the police, aren't you? I would even say you are supposed to be super detectives, aren't you?”
“You are defeating the very purpose of what you sought to achieve. ... Just doesn't make sense at all to me. Does it make sense to you?”
“It might be where we lost it wrong; we got it wrong there. It might be where we made a mistake in telling her.”
“All of this ends up being totally inconclusive. And in my book, I would say you were responsible for that.”
“It looks like you and your colleagues sabotaged the whole 252 operation because the money was there ... all she had to do was give it to you and you arrest her.”
“I only thought of obeying the instructions from my superintendent.”
“It would have been very difficult, Commissioner. Sometimes you can even be taken out of the unit.”
“This industry is not an easy one, especially if the instruction comes from someone who's above.”
“He instructed us to abandon the chase and meet him at Total Petrol Station on R82 near Lido Hotel.”
“The bricks were packed in medium-sized boxes lined with white foam.”
Our analysis
The bottom line
The morning of this day is a more damaging piece of evidence than its headline suggests, and the damage is not to Mashala personally. A specialised unit identified a bribe, obtained authority to run a section 252A operation, concluded that a fellow officer was holding the money, and then told that officer what they were doing. The question the commission is actually asking is not whether two detectives were careless. It is whether an investigation into police corruption, conducted by police, can be expected to survive contact with the people it is investigating. Mashala's own defence makes the point better than the criticism does: he says it would have failed anyway because she would have warned the others. If that is true, the operation was doomed by the network rather than by the mistake, which is the commission's whole thesis stated by a witness who did not intend to state it.
The chairperson's phrase, 'totally inconclusive', is the phrase to hold onto. A man was convicted of taking R1.5 million off a civilian at the roadside. Nobody has been held to account for the attempt to make that case disappear, and on the evidence before the commission three of the officers said to have been involved in it are still in their posts. The commission is not a court and cannot convict anyone. But it can put the sequence on the public record in a way that makes the absence of consequence visible, and that is what the morning did.
The afternoon supplies the mechanism the September evidence was missing. Superintendent de Beer described a department in which misconduct does not surface and disciplinary processes die; she could not explain from internal affairs why individual officers comply. Cutalele can. The instruction comes by telephone from a superintendent who shouts, there is no explanation attached to it, asking for one is not a realistic option, and refusing it can get you removed from the unit. That is not a story about one officer. It is a description of how a single commander can control the operational conduct of a unit without leaving a paper trail, which is exactly the condition under which Potsane's much graver allegation, that officers were told to release suspects and take bribes, becomes possible rather than absurd. None of it has been tested and Mr Manyama has answered none of it.
The Lakewood Estate mansion is the part of this day that will be misreported, and the evidence leader's own framing is the protection against it. A registered owner shares a surname with the most heavily covered witness this commission has heard. Advocate Segeels-Ncube told the panel in terms that the relationship has not been established and that the name is withheld because it is not clear the owner knew what the property was being used for. Matlala is a common surname in South Africa. The connection that would matter is not a surname but a line of control over a property used to store seventeen bricks of suspected cocaine, and the commission does not yet have one. This archive will name nobody and draw no line until it does.
Three witnesses in one day, after a week in which the evidence ran from a former police minister to the acting head of the country's intelligence coordinating body, is worth noticing on its own. The commission has a report due to the President on 25 January 2027 and it is working through its JMPD material at pace. What it has built across Days 173 and 194 is a vertical slice: an internal affairs head who cannot make cases stick, constables who cannot question orders, a Hawks investigator whose operation was defeated from inside, and a convicted officer whose protectors were never charged. Whether that becomes a finding about the metro police or a finding about the whole chain will depend on what the commission does with the SAPS and Hawks ends of it, which it has not yet reached.
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.
On the record
Who testified this day
Warrant Officer Phuti Eric Mashala
Investigator, Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks)
View profile →TestifiedConstable Malibongwe Michael Cutalele
Officer, Tactical Response Unit, Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department
View profile →TestifiedConstable Michael Potsane
Officer, Tactical Response Unit, Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department
View profile →Follow the threads
Who Warrant Officer Phuti Eric Mashala connects to
Eric Mphahlele
Mashala was the investigating officer in the case of the R1.5 million taken from a businessman at a roadside stop in August 2023. Mphahlele has been convicted in the criminal courts, which is not a finding of this commission.
View profile →The supervisor he suspected and told anywayInspector Emma Phakoane
Per Inside Politics, Mashala told the commission he believed Inspector Emma Phakoane was directly involved because she could direct Mphahlele by telephone from the vehicle, and that investigators nonetheless told her about the planned entrapment operation. Phakoane has answered nothing on this record and is presumed innocent.
View profile →The senior JMPD officer said to have arranged the offerChief Superintendent Tintswalo Rikhotso
On the Day 194 evidence Rikhotso arranged the R250 000 offer to make the docket disappear. She has answered nothing on this record, has been convicted of nothing, and is presumed innocent.
View profile →The internal affairs head who raised the same case firstSuperintendent Elmarie de Beer
De Beer told the commission on Day 173, 15 September 2026, that a JMPD inspector had offered a Hawks officer R550 000 to secure Mphahlele's release. Mashala's Day 194 evidence is the Hawks side of the same matter, and the figures reported are not identical.
View profile →In the room & on the record
Counsel, the panel and sources
Evidence led by
On the panel
Sources
- SABC News - Hawks investigator admits entrapment ops error at Madlanga Commission (13 Nov 2026) ↗
- SABC News, Sibahle Motha - 'Owner of mansion where cocaine was found has Matlala surname' (13 Nov 2026, 16:48) ↗
- IOL - 'It just doesn't make sense': Madlanga tears into Hawks' Phuti Mashala over R1m robbery probe blunders (13 Nov 2026) ↗
- The Citizen - 'Does it make sense to you?': Madlanga questions why Hawks officer tipped off suspect's friend in R1.5m robbery case (13 Nov 2026) ↗
- Inside Politics, Johnathan Paoli - Hawks investigator admits mistake in R1.5m JMPD robbery case (13 Nov 2026) ↗
- Inside Politics, Johnathan Paoli - Madlanga Commission: JMPD officer says he abandoned Ford Ranger chase on Manyama's orders (13 Nov 2026) ↗
- YFM - Madlanga Commission: Hawks officer questioned over JMPD misconduct allegations (13 Nov 2026) ↗
- Bulletin - JMPD officer tells Madlanga Commission disobeying superiors is difficult (13 Nov 2026, 15:44) ↗
- SABC News - LIVE | Madlanga Commission of Inquiry Day 194 | 13 November 2026 ↗