Madlanga Commission Intensifies – IDAC Witness Takes the Stand as Andrea Johnson Faces Return Summons
By Mpho Tumelo Modise | Editor-in-Chief, EZA News
A secretly recorded phone call made while a senior official was actively testifying under oath. An admission of ignorance about names that appear in official summonses. An institution’s internal watchdog turning on its own former head. This is not political theatre – this is the inner architecture of South Africa’s anti-corruption machinery fracturing in real time.
Pretoria – The Madlanga Commission of Inquiry reached a turning point on Thursday morning when IDAC state advocate Drushantha Ramsamy took the stand at the Brigitte Mabandla Justice College – and immediately placed her former boss, recently resigned IDAC head Advocate Andrea Johnson, at the centre of what she described as deliberate deception of the commission.
The centrepiece of Ramsamy’s testimony was explosive: a secretly recorded phone call between Ramsamy and Johnson, made on 22 July 2026 – the very day Johnson was herself testifying before the commission. The audio was played in full to commissioners and evidence leaders, and its contents cut directly to the credibility of everything Johnson said during her six days on the stand.
The call centred on IDAC’s investigation into Crime Intelligence head Dumisani Khumalo, related to the controversial appointment of former BMW employee Dineo Mokwele to a brigadier post – an investigation triggered in November 2024 by a Section 27 referral submitted by National Coloured Congress leader and Member of Parliament Fadiel Adams. In the recording, Johnson is heard expressing confusion about the very investigation she had been publicly claiming to have overseen with authority.
“I need to understand: where did I get those names?” Johnson can be heard saying, referring to names that appeared on official summonses issued under her authority. “It’s fine if you say you got it from me, but I don’t know where I got it from.”
The implication is severe. If Johnson signed summonses without knowing the origin of the names on them, the legal integrity of those summonses – and by extension the investigations and arrests that flowed from them – is fundamentally compromised. The recording also captured Johnson predicting chaos, telling Ramsamy: “We’ll see what we are going to do, but it’s just going to be a s**t show.”
That this call was made during Johnson’s own testimony session is not a peripheral detail. It suggests that Johnson was, in real time, seeking to align her version of events with a subordinate whose own testimony she knew was forthcoming. The commission will now have to determine what, if any, significance to draw from that timing.
Ramsamy wasted no time in confronting the record directly. “Advocate Johnson told many untruths about me and my involvement in what is known as the Mokwele case,” she told the commission. “She did not disclose that I raised concerns from the onset and repeatedly thereafter.”
Ramsamy’s concerns were not new. She testified that after arrests and bail proceedings linked to the investigations in June 2025, she had contacted a Hawks officer specifically to raise alarms about what she described as irregularities in the handling of a cluster of investigations she knew internally as “Project Diversion” – a label she attributed directly to Johnson. That project encompassed probes into Crime Intelligence’s leadership, including both Khumalo and suspended national police commissioner Fannie Masemola, relating to the R360 million Medicare24 tender awarded to Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala.
It was Ramsamy who sought to make a protected disclosure. It was the Hawks who alerted the commission to her disclosures during Johnson’s own testimony – which is how she came to be called as a witness at all. Evidence leader Lee Segeels-Ncube confirmed to the commission that the allegations only emerged in this way, after the Hawks flagged Ramsamy’s disclosures to the inquiry.
The commission has already heard Commissioner Madlanga directly challenge Johnson on the characterisation of Masemola’s arrest as “calculated” and designed to “embarrass” him – language that spoke not of procedural judgment but of institutional weaponisation. Johnson’s own admissions under questioning – including that she had misused legal process in certain arrests – had already weakened her credibility before Thursday’s developments.
What Ramsamy’s testimony adds is a dimension of alleged active deception. An IDAC advocate accusing the former head of lying under oath and manipulating evidence is not a disagreement about process. It is a direct allegation that the person leading South Africa’s premier anti-corruption institution was not telling the truth to the commission established to hold that institution to account.
Johnson, who resigned on 28 July and whose departure was accepted immediately by President Ramaphosa, now faces the prospect of being recalled. As of Thursday afternoon, IOL reported that Johnson is likely to be summoned before the commission again following the fresh allegations Ramsamy has placed on the record.
South Africa’s anti-corruption framework depends on the credibility of the institutions tasked with investigating the powerful. When those institutions are themselves subjects of an inquiry into their own conduct – and when the evidence being led includes secret recordings, allegations of perjury, and a paper trail of summonses signed without knowledge of their own origins – the question is no longer about any individual official. It is about whether the architecture is sound. The Madlanga Commission, piece by piece, is answering that question. The picture it is assembling is not reassuring.
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