Most coverage of the Madlanga Commission reads like a court transcript: who said what, which affidavit contradicts which. Here’s the bigger story underneath it - and why it’s one of the oldest stories there is.
Skip the headlines for a second
If you’ve glanced at a headline about “a disputed affidavit” or “an aunty” last week and moved on, that’s understandable. Commission testimony is dense, procedural and hard to follow day to day.
But strip away the names and the legal detail, and the Madlanga Commission is asking one of the oldest questions in the history of power: what happens to a system when the people meant to police it start protecting each other instead?
That question has ended empires.
History’s answer: it’s rarely the enemy at the gates
When large, seemingly stable systems collapse, historians are often struck by how little the fatal damage has to do with outside threats.
The enemy within is almost always more dangerous than the enemy at the gates - it operates with the very trust and authority the system was built to protect, and by the time it’s noticed, the damage is already done from the inside out.
The Inca Empire, for instance, controlled a vast, sophisticated territory, one of the most administratively advanced civilisations in the Americas. It did not fall simply because Spanish conquistadors arrived. It was already weakened by internal divisions, including a succession dispute that left rival factions focused on their own struggles rather than the stability of the empire itself.
The Roman Empire’s own institutions, its courts, its Senate, its provincial governors, did not stop functioning because barbarians overwhelmed them in a single blow. They hollowed out slowly, as officials who were supposed to serve the public increasingly served their own interests, until trust in the system itself began to erode.
The pattern repeats: institutions rarely die from a single external attack but from the slow erosion of internal trust.
The Romans had a phrase for this dilemma: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who watches the watchmen?”)
Written by the Roman poet Juvenal almost 2,000 years ago, the question remains one of the oldest problems of governance. Every society relies on rules, systems and institutions designed to keep power in check. But what happens when the people responsible for enforcing those rules become the people who need to be watched?
Why that pattern matters here
South Africa created the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (IDAC) to be part of the system ordinary people could still trust when confidence in the criminal justice system had been badly shaken.
It exists to strengthen the country’s capacity to investigate and prosecute serious corruption and related offences. It was established against the backdrop of long-standing concerns about corruption and weaknesses in the criminal justice system.
IDAC was meant to be different. It was meant to be the exception. But good, solid institutions also need good, solid people to occupy those positions. A system can have the right laws and structures and still fail if the people inside it don’t hold to them.
That is exactly why last week’s testimony matters so much.
One of the key witnesses is National Coloured Congress leader and suspended MP Fadiel Adams, whose affidavit became central to an IDAC investigation into Crime Intelligence head Lieutenant-General Dumisani Khumalo and other senior officers. They were arrested and charged with fraud and corruption over the alleged irregular appointment of Brigadier Dineo Mokwele, charges the National Prosecuting Authority later withdrew.
The commission is now examining how that investigation was conducted.
The allegation is not simply that one investigator behaved improperly. According to Adams’s account, there may have been influence from within the unit over aspects of the investigation, including the circumstances surrounding an affidavit. Advocate Andrea Johnson denies knowing where the additional affidavit came from.
If Adams’s allegation is proven, it is not a procedural footnote. It would strike at the very problem the commission exists to investigate: the possibility of a breakdown inside an institution meant to strengthen the fight against corruption.
The uncomfortable twist
Here is where the story resists a clean villain.
The witness making this allegation, Fadiel Adams, has himself been shown this week to have given the commission incorrect and shifting testimony on several points. He has admitted to being untruthful about at least one timeline.
So the commission, and the public, cannot simply accept his account at face value.
But neither can it dismiss it, because the pattern he is describing, a case reshaped by someone with influence, evidence gathered outside the rules, a hierarchy protecting itself, is precisely the kind of pattern this inquiry was created to examine.
That tension: a possibly unreliable messenger carrying a possibly true warning, is not a distraction from the real story. It is the real story.
It is the same tension every whistleblower-driven investigation has had to confront: whether the flaws of the person raising an alarm mean the alarm itself should be ignored. Watergate’s own unravelling depended partly on informants with their own complicated motives, a reminder that history rarely hands investigators a perfectly clean witness.
What to actually watch for
Forget trying to track every affidavit number and email date. Watch for the answer to one question as hearings continue:
Did the commission find that evidence in this case was shaped by someone protecting their own interests, rather than gathered solely in pursuit of the truth?
If yes, it confirms the deepest fear driving the whole commission: that corruption does not only hide among criminals, it can also hide inside the institutions created to catch them.
If no, it raises a different, still-important question: how easily can a serious institution and its leadership be shaken by a claim that does not hold up?
Either way, the outcome will shape how much South Africans can trust the next anti-corruption unit that says: trust us, we are different.
Hearings continue on today (Monday).
vivian.warby@the national.co.za
* The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group