We begin the year amid anticipation and political uncertainty. South Africa has, over time, witnessed a succession of Commissions of Inquiry and related tribunals unfolding in the public gaze. These processes are presented as exercises in truth-seeking and accountability, yet they are carefully sequenced, with witnesses lined up to advance particular narratives and frames of understanding.

In moments such as Shamila Batohi’s public “walk-out”, the country was confronted with a form of institutional arrogance that has long remained undisturbed, insulated from meaningful interrogation. It also revealed a different ethic of arrogance that remains under-analysed in our race discourse: one that fraternises with being Black only to conceal the same disdain for Africans that whiteness does.

These public processes are not neutral. They operate within a racialised moral order that is rarely acknowledged. They are signs of what exists in the underbelly of South Africa’s dysfunctional government and society at large. They are reminders of a national liberation that never occurred.

Most crucially, they remind us of the status of the Black body and mind in neo-colonial states, while whiteness thrives in every respect. The bodies most frequently subjected to public exposure, suspicion and humiliation are Black.

Through repeated public rituals of accusation, interrogation and judgement, society is conditioned to associate Blackness with moral failure, ethical instability and corruption. Black children grow up absorbing these spectacles. They internalise the idea that authority and moral legitimacy reside elsewhere, while Blackness exists under permanent suspicion. At the same time, white society is reassured of its moral superiority, and white children are fed a continuous confirmation that disorder and corruption belong to Black governance rather than to colonial dispossession and structural power. These processes normalise a racial hierarchy of morality under the guise of legality and accountability. The diversion they represent seeks to erase the original sin of Black marginalisation, which condemns Africans to what I call social death, social dysfunction, indignity and socio-economic alienation.

There is undeniable complexity in these proceedings: pre-emptive manoeuvres, manipulation of perception, misdirection, subterfuge, partial truths, outright falsehoods and choreographed public diversion. These practices obscure the deeper issues that lie beneath the social pathologies South Africa continues to experience. They mirror the subterfuge of the so-called Government of National Unity, a political arrangement that functions less as renewal than as continuity. It sustains and extends the ideological manipulation embedded in the 1994 settlement, which was celebrated as a democratic breakthrough while leaving intact the core architecture of colonial power, including the logic whereby “reparations” were paid to slave owners when slavery was abolished, while the enslaved were merely “freed”.

These processes command attention because they are fresh in public memory and carry a seductive force that repeatedly draws society away from confronting the original injustice that plunged African people into structural dispossession. That seduction is not accidental. It reflects the mirage of legality itself, a mechanism through which ruling classes maintain control while appearing to pursue accountability. However, this “accountability” does not address what truly matters: land theft, social degradation, abject poverty, control of state machinery, and a criminal justice system captured by thugs and former apartheid operatives.

The staged public rituals of these proceedings conceal a more uncomfortable truth: the subjects of inquiry are symptoms of what post-apartheid South Africa has failed to dismantle. Corruption, nepotism and moral decay were not inventions of democracy. They are inherited maladies of colonial domination. Instead of uprooting them, the post-apartheid state has refined and institutionalised them, deepening the misery of African people. The judiciary and the legal fraternity are not solutions for uncovering elusive truth; they are both tools and victims of the manipulation of post-apartheid South Africa by a few.

Coloniality remains alive in the moral fibre of society. It manifests in churches, courts, political institutions and urban decay. It appears in the ease with which leaders accept bribes and in the refusal of white society to relinquish entrenched privilege, unless change guarantees the preservation of inherited advantage and the universalisation of a singular worldview. While commissions often appear narrowly mandated, they divert attention from naming the real culprits of social decay. At the same time, they illuminate the moral failures of post-apartheid leadership, from Nelson Mandela through Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa.

None of these leaders possessed, or perhaps were able to exercise, the ideological courage required to dismantle the inherited order and construct a truly decolonial society. This may reflect a collective failure rather than individual moral weakness. Mandela was a great figure, yet also a missed historical opportunity. His moral authority, both domestically and globally, could have carried the country toward a more liberatory path. His emphasis on reconciliation and forgiveness constrained the possibility of deeper structural rupture. We now inhabit the consequences of that restraint, which has hardened into political culture under the rubric of sophistication.

This raises a fundamental question: can commissions of inquiry resolve the country’s crises when society itself remains unwilling to confront its moral foundations? Do we require commissions to tell us what is already evident? Can they assist in putting in place a more liberatory policy framework? Often these commissions play out as legal thrillers, used as instruments of political diversion and scapegoating. They are weaponised against long-identified political foes and shield those indispensable to the prevailing political grand game.

These inquiries are inseparable from a broader moral and spiritual degradation rooted in a political system that never intended to dismantle colonial and apartheid structures. Crime, corruption and inequality are driven by unrestrained market control, racial arrogance, persistent poverty, untouched apartheid geography, and a culture of corruption whose deepest root remains historical dispossession.

Our moral regeneration campaign should have included a far broader public education and psycho-cybernetical mandate: a transformation of consciousness, the revival of Black Consciousness, and the enhancement of the role of religion, rather than the effective banishment of God from the body politic that we chose. What we are witnessing today are the consequences of failing to build a new person, a new ethos and a genuinely new society. The criminal justice system sits at the centre of this failure. It is both victim and participant in a societal descent marked by institutional weakness and moral confusion.

Watching commissions unfold exposes the deficiencies of South Africa’s legal culture. A pattern of predetermined outcomes is often visible. As seen most clearly during the Zondo Commission, early witnesses are positioned to confirm the mandate’s premise. Their testimony acquires authority that diminishes later contradictions. These “sweetheart witnesses” are afforded latitude to speculate without rigorous challenge. Often everyone, including officials, is caught up in the seductive power of the first accusing witness, who proceeds with conjecture and speculation. This method claims to search for truth but in fact confirms a convenient narrative. It avoids confronting deeper truths: whether 1994 delivered liberation; whether white privilege has been dismantled; whether land restitution has occurred; whether democracy reflects post-colonial aspirations; whether the economy remains racially concentrated; and why privatisation continues in a society that requires socialised ownership of productive assets.

The statute governing these inquiries, the Commissions Act 8 of 1947, is a colonial relic. It provides little guidance on procedure, evidence leadership or witness rights. Its language belongs to another political era, referencing the Governor-General and the Union. The 1996 amendment failed to modernise its purpose or structure. As a result, commissions are shaped by the discretion of those appointed to lead them. Evidence leaders, trained in adversarial litigation, struggle to pursue objective truth. They default to prosecutorial instincts, seeking confirmation rather than exploration. The statute does not define their role, creating confusion and inconsistency. Carrying their own confirmation bias, they assume the posture of prosecutors armed with case theories that any inconvenient truth would disturb.

This confusion undermines the truth-seeking mandate. Evidence leaders sometimes cross-examine witnesses they previously guided, revealing structural incoherence rather than individual malice. The process becomes vulnerable to confirmation bias. Commissions should not own witnesses, nor allow themselves to be seduced by the most appealing narrative. Neutrality requires equal rigour. The search for truth demands an open posture, recognising that all testimony may be partial, strategic or self-interested. There is a much deeper knot in the belly of the state. It requires a more expansive epistemic approach. The time may also have come for a specialised court for intelligence matters, akin to military courts. Subjecting intelligence truth-claims to the logic of ordinary civil courts is inadequate. Intelligence is a specialised domain of statecraft in which truth is layered, strategic and complex.

South Africa’s legal culture remains anchored in colonial epistemology. Lawyers are trained to defend narratives rather than interrogate truth for the public good. Judges emerge from the same culture. Law is treated as neutral, though it has always functioned as a tool of power. Public proceedings become spectacles. Media and analysts amplify binary interpretations. Society is encouraged to take sides rather than think critically. This environment nurtures public gullibility and reinforces moral hierarchies.

Commissions become mechanisms of postponement. They create the impression of action without intent to resolve. They divert attention from foundational questions of land, economy, power and constitutional design. Corruption matters, but fixation on isolated transgressions deflects from structural injustice. These inquiries function as public rituals that pacify while leaving intact the architecture of inequality.

The Commissions Act must be replaced with legislation rooted in a decolonial moral vision. Procedures must prioritise truth, fairness and ethical formation. Evidence leadership must be reconceptualised. Beyond law, society requires moral renewal. This demands courage, ideological clarity and a willingness to dismantle inherited structures. It requires confronting beliefs in Black inferiority, restoring collective dignity and reclaiming political purpose.

Tolerance of white privilege and economic concentration undermines any project of non-racialism. Non-racialism without justice is pacification. It demands indefinite endurance of humiliation. Such a society does not resolve conflict; it stores it. What is postponed is confrontation. Under these conditions, injustice does not disappear. It accumulates. The result is not stability, but the slow cultivation of civil war.

It is for this reason that I propose a thoroughgoing revolution of the state: its philosophical foundations, constitution, moral rectitude, legal system, wealth distribution, health, education, security, food systems, industrial policy, and the nature of democracy itself, including the election of political leaders and judges. There should be no sacred cows. I propose even a specialised political court above the Constitutional Court, composed of special judges and eminent persons, mandated to determine exceptional cases that strike at the heart of national liberation. A Second Republic is our only path forward. Otherwise, commissions of inquiry will remain what they have become: legal thrillers without transformative consequence.

* Muzi Sikhakhane SC is a South African advocate and Senior Counsel based in Johannesburg. Founding chair of the Pan African Bar Association of South Africa, he is known for his work on constitutional, criminal, and public-interest matters, and for his critiques of unresolved injustices in post-apartheid South Africa. He is the author of Odyssey of Liberation: A Memoir of a Rebel Advocate.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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