CHARLES MATSEKE | The Madlanga Commission and South Africa’s manufacturing of public consent

When President Cyril Ramaphosa received the Madlanga Commission’s interim report on 17 December 2025, the handover was framed as institutional progress. Three months after the first witness testified, the state had met its own benchmark.

In a country weary of scandal and delay this choreography matters. But choreography is not accountability. And milestones are not truth.

To understand what the Madlanga Commission currently represents and what it risks becoming two texts remain indispensable: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent.

Together, they offer a framework not for authoritarian repression alone, but for democratic systems that manage dissent, curate outrage, and substitute procedure for consequence.

South Africa does not resemble Orwell’s Oceania in form. But functionally, it increasingly mirrors it in one critical respect: truth is not denied outright, it is simply delayed, filtered, and fragmented, while public consent is manufactured through the appearance of action.

Because theinterim report is not public, no analyst outside the Presidency or the Commission can responsibly list findings or recommendations. Any attempt to do so would collapse into conjecture. Methodologically, that line cannot be crossed!

What can be analysed are process outputs: timelines, phases, witness counts, procedural architecture, and political signalling. In 1984, domination is not achieved by constant lying, but by controlling which facts enter the record, and when.

Similarly, Manufacturing Consent shows how elite systems rely less on censorship than on selective visibility.

On paper, the Madlanga Commission has moved quickly and decisively:

• Established in July 2025 in response to allegations of criminal syndicate infiltration, political interference, and institutional compromise within the criminal justice system
• Terms of Reference gazetted on 23 July; operational rules on 22 August
• Hearings launched on 17 September after an initial postponement
• Thirty-seven witnesses heard by mid-December
• Interim report delivered exactly three months after the first witness testified

These milestones are consistently foregrounded in official communication. This emphasis is not incidental. As Manufacturing Consent explains, legitimacy is sustained by highlighting procedural success while deferring outcome evaluation. The public is encouraged to equate motion with progress.

The Commission’s two-phase structure: corroboration first, responses later is methodologically defensible and in isolation a strength to the elites protected within.

Yet even this architecture performs a political function: it reassures the public that balance is being observed, while time is absorbed in a system historically resistant to consequence.

The Commission’s speed distinguishes it from inquiries that drift for years. Its mandate clarity focused on syndicate infiltration and institutional compromise is unusually tight. The Presidency’s explicit signalling that criminal referrals are expected is not trivial.

But Orwell’s warning is instructive here: authoritarian drift does not begin with failure. It begins with partial success that conditions the public to accept less.

A commission can move efficiently, appear serious, and still function primarily as a stabilising mechanism absorbing public anger without destabilising elite power.

A systematic reading of the Commission’s process reveals an important empirical pattern: who has appeared, and who has not.

Despite their names surfacing in testimony and public discourse linked to allegations concerning the compromise of the security cluster and the looting of state institutions including Tembisa Hospital Binjani Chauke and Morgan Maumela were not called during the Commission’s initial phases.

This observation is not an assertion of guilt. It is a process-based fact. In scientific terms, omission is not neutral; it is a variable. In institutional analysis, patterns of selectivity matter because they shape the directionality of accountability.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell shows that power lies not only in repression, but in deciding what is examinable.

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman demonstrate how elite systems protect themselves by filtering controversies so that lines of causality rarely reach their political apex.

The absence of these figures matters because testimony from individuals positioned at the intersection of business, security, and political proximity could have tested whether accountability flows upward, not only outward or downward.

Whether such lines would ultimately withstand legal scrutiny is beside the point. What matters is that they were not publicly tested during the interim phase.

This is not censorship. It is curation almost perfected.

The decision not to release even a summarised interim report compounds this problem. Transparency deferred is not neutrality; it is power exercised through timing. The public is asked to trust the process while being denied access to substance.

In Orwell’s world, history is rewritten. In Chomsky’s, information is filtered. South Africa’s commission culture sits between these models: truth is neither erased nor revealed, it is managed.

At this stage, the Commission has delivered process legitimacy, not substantive accountability.

Milestones achieved:

• Mandate established

• Rules gazetted
• Hearings conducted
• Witnesses heard
• Interim report delivered
• Impact still unmeasured:
• Criminal referrals
• Prosecutions
• Disciplinary action
• Institutional reform

This distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between justice as spectacle and justice as consequence. A society that repeatedly confuses the two becomes governable not through fear, but through fatigue.

If the final report produces clear referrals, prosecutions, and reform, the Madlanga Commission may yet interrupt South Africa’s pattern of inquiry without consequence.

If it does not, its function will be clearer: to stabilise political authority, manage public outrage, and manufacture consent through procedure itself.

Orwell warned of a society where truth is endlessly postponed. Chomsky warned of democracies where consent is engineered rather than earned. South Africa now stands at their intersection. The question is no longer whether the system can investigate itself but whether it is willing to implicate itself.

Charles Matseke (MPhil in Politics and International Relations) is a researcher and writer with a keen interest in contemporary political dynamics. His research focuses on electoral politics, foreign policy analysis, and international relations, with a particular emphasis on the Global South and Africa's role in global affairs.