Dear Editor,

The intrepid evidence leaders at the Madlanga Commission have excelled yet again, this time by securing the report and evidence of the World Bank’s resident guru on vetting of criminal justice administration officials and on money laundering, Laura Pop. (Business Day 17 September 2026) https://www.businessday.co.za/news/law/2026-09-16-criminal-justice-officials-should-face-financial-vetting-madlanga-commission-told/.

Pop has wide experience gathered over 17 years while studying and addressing organised crime and the corruption of officialdom in various countries in Eastern Europe, South Asia and in the recent history of Kenya after it used the SA Constitution as a precedent for reforming its own legal order.

If the thrust of the evidence given by Pop to the Commission on 16 September finds its way into the recommendations of the commission, the ability of our state to withstand the ravages of the take-over of control of the criminal justice administration (police, prosecutors and judges) by nefarious operators will be considerably improved. The commissioners were served a veritable smorgasbord of strategies to stamp out the creeping criminalisation of the anti-corruption machinery of state which has informed the culture of corruption with impunity currently abroad in the land. Getting the recommendations right and ensuring their implementation are the most direct way in which to preserve the rule of law in SA, a central goal of the commission. It is possible, with appropriate political will, to uphold the tenets of constitutionalism, embraced in the wording of the first chapter of the Constitution that became our supreme law when the parliamentary sovereignty of the old SA was replaced in 1994.

The careful financial vetting of both incumbents and candidates for positions in the judiciary and in the anti-corruption machinery of state will be central to the task of improving integrity, accountability, and productivity in these important aspects of governance. Life-style audits, examination of finances of candidates and even lie-detector testing are all tools available to the state if the necessary political will to clean up its act on the anti-corruption front can be mustered.

Treating the evidence pouring out at the commission as “uncomfortable truths about the criminal justice administration” , as ANC MP Zola Nqola is wont to do, downplays the threat posed to life as we know it in SA. An existential threat is evident from any proper conspectus of that evidence; certainly, the economic doldrums currently endured for far too long will only dissipate if the radical reforms suggested in the evidence of Pop materialise from the adoption and implementation of suitably pertinent recommendations by the commission. A new Chapter Nine Anti-Corruption body would be a good start.

Yours in accountability,

Paul Hoffman SC