Andrea Johnson’s ‘Project Diversion’ Was a Personal Campaign Against Senior Police Officials, Commission Told
By Mpho Tumelo Modise | Editor-in-Chief, EZA News
The Madlanga Commission of Inquiry heard testimony over the weekend that strikes at the heart of the question that has defined its proceedings: was the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption operating as an accountable prosecutorial institution, or had it become a vehicle for the personal and political agendas of its leadership?
Testimony before the commission described a programme allegedly run within IDAC that witnesses have characterised as “Project Diversion” – an initiative that, according to testimony, was designed and driven by former IDAC head Advocate Andrea Johnson as a personal campaign against senior figures in the South African Police Service, rather than as a legitimate investigative project grounded in prosecutorial merit.
The characterisation, if accurate, would represent one of the most serious accountability failures in the short history of an institution that was established precisely to address the failures of accountability that defined the Zuma era. IDAC was constituted after the Zondo Commission’s findings identified the capture of prosecutorial and investigative institutions as central to the mechanism by which state resources were looted at scale. An IDAC that itself became captured – not by political networks seeking to protect corrupt arrangements, but by its own head’s institutional rivalries and personal agendas – would represent a failure of a different but equally corrosive kind.
The commission’s examination of what specifically “Project Diversion” entailed – its targets, its methods, the internal authorisation it received or did not receive, and the extent to which its activities were known to those who were supposed to oversee IDAC – is expected to continue as further witnesses are called. The next scheduled appearance of significance is National Coloured Congress leader and MP Fadiel Adams, who is due before the commission on 11 August.
For South Africans watching these proceedings, the accumulating testimony is producing a picture of IDAC under Johnson’s leadership that is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the institution’s founding purpose. Whether that picture is complete, or whether subsequent testimony will complicate or contradict elements of it, is the work the commission still has before it. What the proceedings have already established, beyond reasonable dispute, is that IDAC requires a fundamental reckoning – with its past conduct, its internal culture, and the governance framework that allowed the conduct now being described in testimony to persist.
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