Everyone but the man with the keys – Madlanga Commission Day 171
Godfrey Lebeya was cross-examined at the Madlanga Commission on 1 September 2026 about the 541kg of cocaine stolen from the Hawks office in Port Shepstone in November 2021. The afternoon turned on a single document, a request from the KwaZulu-Natal Hawks head to put 42 people on a polygraph, which Lebeya approved and which does not include the man who chose the building or the man who held the keys, because they are the same person. Two written recommendations for a misconduct investigation reached Lebeya’s desk, one in 2022 and one in 2023, and nothing was done about either. Evidence leader Lee Segeels-Ncube told him there were only two explanations left for that, and he rejected both.
What was stolen, and where it was kept
The cocaine was seized in June 2021 from a shipping container at the CHC container depot in the Isipingo industrial area near Durban harbour. Its street value has been put at between R200 million and R250 million.
The Commission has heard that officers at that scene did not follow basic protocol. The Local Criminal Record Centre was never called to arrange for a crime scene examiner to attend and collect fingerprints and DNA.
The drugs were then taken to the Hawks office in Port Shepstone. That building had no CCTV, no perimeter sensors, no 24 hour guards and no armed response, and its alarm system did not work. It had already been through multiple security breaches.
The drugs were discovered missing on 8 November 2021.
Did Lebeya know where they were
Lebeya’s evidence is that he only learned the cocaine was being kept at Port Shepstone when it was stolen.
The KwaZulu-Natal Hawks head, Major General Lesetja Senona, has said the opposite three times. In his first statement he wrote that he agreed the exhibits would be stored at Port Shepstone and that his supervisor, Lebeya, was then informed. Asked in writing by the Commission who he told before the drugs went missing, he answered that he informed his supervisor at the time, Lebeya. He said it again in his oral evidence in January 2026.
Segeels-Ncube put it to Lebeya that either Senona is lying, or Lebeya is lying, or they are both mistaken.
Lebeya said he cannot say that Senona is lying. He said he cannot recall being told where the drugs were kept, and because he cannot recall it, he takes it that he was not told.
Commissioner Sesi Baloyi then took him through what he does remember. He knew about the seizure on the day it happened. He knew which units were involved, the quantity seized, and whether anyone had been arrested. He accepted all of that.
Baloyi asked whether he would have expected Senona to tell him that 541kg of cocaine was being kept at a Hawks office rather than at a police station or the forensic laboratory. Lebeya said he would have expected him to.
She then asked whether the probability is that Senona did tell him, and that he simply does not remember.
Lebeya said probably.
The polygraph list
On 23 November 2021, about two and a half weeks after the theft was discovered, Senona applied to Lebeya for authorisation to polygraph members over what the document calls a physical security breach at Port Shepstone. That authorisation sits with the national head.
The list runs to 42 names. Eighteen are from the Port Shepstone unit and 24 from the Durban unit, which is a separate office more than 100km up the coast.
Some of those named had no connection to the drugs at all. Warrant Officer Sander of the Durban unit had nothing to do with seizing or storing them. The last three names on the Port Shepstone list are not investigators. They are an administrative clerk, a foreman and a cleaner.
Two names are absent. Senona himself, and a brigadier below him.
Lebeya signed the application the same day.
What Lebeya knew by January 2022
Lebeya sent his deputy, Lieutenant General Tebello Constance Mosikili, to KwaZulu-Natal after the theft on a fact finding assignment. Her information note reached him in January 2022, with Senona’s own factual report attached to it.
That report records three things. The keys to the strong room were handed to the provincial head for safekeeping, and the provincial head is Senona. None of the firearm safes inside the same walk-in safe were tampered with, which Senona wrote indicates the suspects were only after the drugs. And it is clear, he wrote, that someone with knowledge of the layout of the office could have successfully assisted the suspects to steal the exhibits.
Mosikili’s own conclusion appears at paragraph 4.4. Based on the glaring security breaches, she wrote, it is not clear what motivated the provincial management to consider Port Shepstone as a safe place to store drugs of such high value.
At paragraph 6.1 she recommended that the national head appoint a senior functionary at the level of a Major General to lead an investigation in terms of the SAPS Discipline Regulations of 2016, to establish whether misconduct was committed in the handling and storage of the exhibits.
Lebeya wrote on the report that paragraph 6 should be discussed. He signed that on 28 January 2022.
Why Senona was never tested
Asked why Senona was not polygraphed, Lebeya said he had not subjected him to a test because at the time he was considering him to be the complainant. He said he did not have evidence pointing to Senona, and that had such evidence come to him he would have acted.
Segeels-Ncube asked where that restraint had been when Senona applied to polygraph 42 people, including a cleaner, against none of whom there was any evidence either.
Lebeya said he did not interrogate it.
She then read his own statement back to him. At page 38 he sets out that he has at some stage commanded all the commercial crime units in Mpumalanga, all the specialised investigation units and all the detectives in Gauteng, all the organised crime units in the country, all the detectives, forensics and intelligence personnel in the country, all the operational divisions, and all DPCI personnel in the country. She put it to him that the person he had described could not credibly say it never occurred to him that the man holding the keys was worth a second look.
Segeels-Ncube then said it could only be one of two things. Either Lebeya was covering up or defending Senona, or this was a complete dereliction of his duties as head of the Hawks. There could be no other explanation.
Lebeya said it was neither of the two.
She asked which it was then. He said the evidence at his disposal did not convince him that he should take the provincial head for a polygraph test.
She said they would leave it there.
A second report, and the same outcome
On 9 November 2023, two years after Mosikili’s note, the then head of Hawks serious organised crime, Major General Alfred Khana, sent Lebeya an information note on the criminal investigation. It is addressed to the national head.
Khana recorded that his team had already recommended that all members involved in recovering the drugs be dealt with under the internal disciplinary regulations, because they failed to handle the crime scene in line with the national instruction on crime scene management and because none of the investigation aids were called out.
Lebeya signed it. Asked by Baloyi what he did with it, he said he noted it.
He said Khana should have sent the recommendations to the supervisors of the members concerned, because that is the practice every commander knows. Baloyi asked whether, given that Lebeya had ordered the investigation and the report came to him because he mandated it, the failure was still Khana’s.
Lebeya said it would be Khana’s fault, but that he also agrees he should have followed it up.
Baloyi told him that unless he had instructed Khana to pass it on, the fault is entirely his, because the report came into his office and he shelved it and gave it to nobody else to action.
The circular defence
Lebeya’s explanation for why no disciplinary investigation ever started is that under the SAPS discipline regulations you must first identify the person to be investigated and give them notice, and Mosikili’s recommendation named nobody.
Chairperson Mbuyiseli Madlanga took that apart. He got Lebeya to accept that an investigation under regulation 8 and a disciplinary process are not the same thing, and that it is the investigation that produces the recommendation on whether to charge anyone. Identifying the wrongdoer, Madlanga put to him, is the purpose of the investigation rather than a precondition for starting one.
Madlanga said Lebeya had been moving around in circles, and that his attitude had been that no clear allegations existed against anybody, so he folded his arms and did nothing.
Lebeya said he did not fold the arms. Asked what he did do in the context of a disciplinary process, he said he expected the individuals to be identified.
Commissioner Sandile Khumalo asked whether the internal disciplinary process against the provincial head ever commenced. Lebeya said no.
Other evidence on the day
Commissioner Khumalo also raised the exhibit register. The drugs were booked into the SAP 13 register at Port Shepstone police station and immediately booked out, and were never entered into any register at the Hawks office, so on paper there was no record of where they were for the months before the theft. Lebeya said he was not aware of that.
Lebeya was also asked about Timothy “Timmy” Marimuthu, following evidence the previous day that he had instructed Hawks officers to meet him. Lebeya said he does not have a specific relationship with Marimuthu and has never met him. He said the name first came to his attention in 2010 during his investigation into irregular Crime Intelligence appointments, that Marimuthu would phone him from time to time, that he would not refuse to answer a call, and that he sent officers to meet him and collect whatever information he wanted to give.
Lebeya twice pointed to the volume of work as the reason things did not reach him, saying at one point that he was dealing with more than 22 000 matters and at another that he was overseeing more than 20 000 and prioritised 100.
Where it stands
Senona has denied any involvement in the theft. His evidence has been that it never occurred to him to volunteer for a polygraph and that his superiors should have ordered one.
Baloyi summed up the position from the bench. They know the discussion on Mosikili’s report never happened, she said, because there was no consequence whatsoever. The drugs got lost, and that was the end of the story. Nobody faced any consequence as a result.
Lebeya remained on the stand on 2 September for the final part of his evidence, on the events of 6 December 2024 at the Sandhurst home of Katiso Molefe.
