On Wednesday 15 July, at the Brigitte Mabandla Justice College in Pretoria, the argument in the room was not whether Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala was guilty. It was whether he had to answer the commission at all while a criminal case was still live. His counsel, Advocate Annelene van den Heever, asked for time. Chairperson Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga asked a narrower question — and then told her the plea deal was not an answer to it.
Two days earlier the plea had already fallen over. In late June, Matlala had reached a plea-and-sentence agreement with the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption on fraud, corruption and money-laundering charges tied to a SAPS healthcare tender awarded to Medicare24 Tshwane District — reported at about R228 million. The bargain on the table was fifteen years, seven suspended: an effective eight, with Matlala lined up as a section 204 state witness. On 1 July, Magistrate Ignatius du Preez accepted the guilty plea but called that sentence too lenient and put twelve years on the table. On 13 July Matlala withdrew rather than take the longer term. The court declared the agreement null and void. The guilty plea fell away. He is presumed innocent. The trial was set down for September.
That collapse was the shield van den Heever brought into the commission. She said her client’s section 35 rights as an accused person — silence, a fair trial, no compelled self-incrimination — had to come before the inquiry’s timetable. She said the defence could not responsibly advise him until it had seen the papers from the failed plea and understood the criminal case. There was also a pending attempted-murder trial. In a commission that looks like a court and is not one, that is a real collision.
Madlanga did not pretend the collision was imaginary. He also refused to let it swallow the whole day. He drew a line between questions that might sit inside the section 35 basket and questions that, even on counsel’s own account, did not. “I do not understand your point about the plea deal and its relevance to my question,” he said. Later: “So clearly what you’ve just said about the plea deal is irrelevant to my question.” He wanted the issues that could be heard without waiting for the criminal process to finish. Van den Heever held her ground as an officer of the court: she could not yet tell which answers were safe and which were not.
The chair still granted a postponement. Testimony moved to 1 September. A sworn statement was ordered by 29 July. It was the second delay of that appearance. The ruling was sharp. It was not a conviction, and it was not a finding. Nothing said in that exchange made Matlala guilty of the tender charges, the attempted-murder case, or the wider allegations the commission is testing. Those remain untested. Everyone named stays presumed innocent.
That is the part South Africa keeps missing. A commission can summon, cut through a delay, and refer names. It cannot prosecute. The same week the President had already stretched the inquiry’s life again — evidence to run into early October, final report now due 16 November — because the work is not finished. Referrals from interim reports still have to be picked up by the police, the Hawks, the NPA. The state that appointed the commission is the state that must decide whether a file moves. It can note a sharp exchange and leave the docket on the desk. It has done so before.
So the plea deal was set aside as the reason to say nothing. The questions Madlanga wanted were left standing. The machinery that is supposed to turn those questions into charges is the same machinery the inquiry was created to examine. A chair can clear a path through an argument. He cannot walk the case to court.
alleyeson.co.za
