Muzi Sikhakhane SC’s withering criticism of South Africa’s addition to legal drama, frequently played out in its entrenched “commission culture”, is difficult to ignore (“The Futility of Commissions of Inquiry and South Africa’s Unfinished Moral Break”, January 14, 2026).

His central insight is that commissions have increasingly become “legal thrillers without transformative consequence”. Public rituals of accountability that signal meaning but fall far short.

Instead of delivering accountability in the only sense that ultimately matters – real institutional change and material justice – we remain trapped in a doom loop of theatre and spectacle rather than the slow, difficult work of reform and repair.

It is an argument worth taking seriously, not only because of its moral urgency, but because it forces an uncomfortable question: why have commissions of inquiry become the State’s default response to crisis?

South Africa’s democratic existence has been peppered with commissions. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the arms deal inquiries, Marikana, State Capture, and most recently, the Madlanga Commission.

Each arrives with solemn promise. Each is framed as necessary for truth. Each becomes a social media trend from testimony. And yet, not too far beneath the surface, the lingering sense is that something is being performed rather than resolved.

The problem is not that commissions are useless in principle. The problem is what they have come to substitute for. Commissions are increasingly deployed in place of the ordinary institutions of democratic accountability. 

They are convened because Parliament no longer commands confidence as an oversight body. They are convened because the police are not trusted to investigate themselves. 

They are convened because the National Prosecuting Authority, hollowed out by political interference and internal decay, has struggled to demonstrate the capacity for decisive action. Commissions have flourished precisely where institutions have failed.

This is what gives commissions their peculiar political character. They are presented as extraordinary mechanisms for truth-seeking, but in reality they are often symptoms of systemic breakdown: the widening gap between political elites and citizens.

The irony is sharp. Commissions are frequently justified as ways of bypassing captured or compromised state machinery, yet they ultimately depend on that very machinery to give their work effect.

Findings must be translated into prosecutions, legislative reform, administrative restructuring, and disciplinary action. But South Africa’s record here is dismal. The TRC and State Capture Commission’s impact speaks for itself.

This is where Sikhakhane, SC’s critique lands with force. The commission becomes a spectacle of legality that reassures the public that something is being done, while the deeper structures of impunity remain intact.

But there is another dimension to this problem, one that Sikhakhane gestures toward but which requires further emphasis.

Commissions are not merely ineffective because the State fails to act on them. They are also conceptually miscast because they approach fundamentally political and policy questions through the lens of law, and increasingly, lawfare.

Commissions are overwhelmingly lawyered spaces. They are chaired by judges. They are staffed by advocates. They are structured around evidence leaders, cross-examination, adversarial sequencing, and forensic contestation. 

They are, in form if not in name, quasi-litigation. Yet the crises they are meant to confront are rarely reducible to legal culpability alone. State Capture was not simply a matter of individual criminality. And the TRC was not merely about testimony. 

State Capture raised questions of institutional design, political party financing, cadre deployment, procurement systems, and the permeability of the state to private power. The TRC was about reparative justice, redistribution, and the morality of the post-apartheid settlement.

These are policy questions. They demand multidisciplinary thinking. They require economists, organisational theorists, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists.

But commissions, as legal proceedings, flatten that complexity into narratives of accusation and defence. The adversarial method is not designed to diagnose systems. It is designed to allocate blame within a constrained procedural frame. 

It privileges coherence of story over breadth of explanation, and performance of accountability over the harder work of institutional understanding. But make no mistake – the lawyers and judges who work there are not to blame.

The British Institute for Government has made a similar critique of the United Kingdom’s inquiry culture. Britain, too, has developed a habit of responding to public catastrophe with judge-led inquiries: Grenfell, contaminated blood, Covid-19, to name only a few.

The IFG notes that inquiries are often lengthy, expensive, overly legalistic, and weak in implementation. They risk becoming exercises in retrospective litigation rather than engines of forward-looking political resolution.

The comparison is illuminating. It shows that the problem is not simply South African, but reflects something deeper about modern governance: when political systems lose the ability to be accountable through ordinary institutions, they retreat into juridified spectacle.

The inquiry becomes the State’s way of saying: we will process this crisis through law because we no longer know how to resolve it through politics. That knee-jerk turn to quasi-litigation is itself a commentary on the hollowing out of democratic accountability. 

Commissions flourish where there is a vacuum between the political elite and the citizen. They are rituals performed in the space where legitimacy has eroded. And this is where inequity enters.

These commissions often expose Black officials, Black institutions, and Black governance to public suspicion and humiliation, while leaving the deeper structures of wealth, power, and historical privilege comparatively untouched.

They become spectacles of moral failure located in the State, rather than interrogations of the broader political economy that shapes it.

If commissions are to mean anything, they cannot remain substitutes for functioning institutions. They cannot remain lawyerly theatres of accusation. They must be embedded within a political and policy architecture capable of acting on truth, not merely performing it.

Otherwise Sikhakhane’s warning will endure: commissions will remain legal thrillers without transformative consequence. Not because truth is unavailable, but because accountability has become a spectacle in a society where power is too rarely made answerable.

* Kameel Premhid is an advocate practising in Johannesburg, with experience in constitutional, administrative, and public law. Despite having recently appeared as counsel at the Madlanga Commission, he writes in his personal capacity on questions of governance, accountability, and institutional design in South Africa. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of any client or organisation.  

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

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