Hearing record
Day 30
The commission opens its Ekurhuleni chapter as Xolani Nciza, the City of Ekurhuleni's former head of employee relations, takes the stand as a new witness and begins laying out allegations of political interference, nepotism and shielded misconduct inside the metro and its police department.
The day in brief
What you need to know
- Day 30 (11 November 2025) turns the commission's attention to the City of Ekurhuleni and its metro police (EMPD), a new front alongside the SAPS-focused evidence heard earlier.
- Xolani Nciza, the metro's former head of employee relations, is sworn in as a fresh witness and begins two days of testimony.
- Nciza's evidence is framed around alleged corruption, irregular appointments and disciplinary processes he says were blocked at senior level.
- A recurring name in his account is suspended acting EMPD chief Brigadier Julius Mkhwanazi, whose disciplinary matter Nciza says he tried to pursue.
- Nciza alleges that instead of being investigated, serious complaints were allowed to lapse without a forensic probe.
- The testimony sets up detailed allegations, developed on Days 31 and 32, about who in the city administration protected whom.
- All individuals named are presumed innocent; Nciza's statements are allegations placed on the public record and have not been tested by a court.
Full coverage
The day, in depth
A new witness and a new front
Sowetan reported that a new witness, Xolani Nciza, took the stand at the Madlanga Commission on 11 November 2025, opening the commission's examination of governance at the City of Ekurhuleni. Nciza is the metro's former head of employee relations, a role that placed him close to the disciplinary machinery of the administration and its metro police department.
Discipline that went nowhere
Nciza's opening evidence centred on his attempts, as the official responsible for employee relations, to move disciplinary processes forward against senior figures. He told the commission that those efforts met resistance from above. The detail of who allegedly intervened, and how, was developed over the following two hearing days.
Our analysis
The bottom line
Day 30 marks a deliberate widening of the commission's lens. Much of the earlier evidence probed the South African Police Service and its national politics; Nciza brings the inquiry down to the municipal level, where an EMPD unit, blue-light vehicles and a city bureaucracy intersect. That matters because the commission's terms of reference reach criminality and political interference across the criminal justice system, not only its national tier.
Nciza's value as a witness is structural: as the person who ran employee relations, he can speak to what happened to complaints once they entered the disciplinary system. His central claim, that misconduct cases stalled rather than being tested, is the kind of allegation a commission is well placed to examine against documents and other witnesses. It is worth stressing that on Day 30 these remain untested assertions, and the officials he describes are entitled to answer them.
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.
In the room & on the record
Counsel, the panel and sources
On the panel
- Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga (chairperson)