Ramsamy: Fake Docs, Bad Investigators, Secret Meetings
State Advocate Drushantha Ramsamy testified before the Madlanga Commission on 5 August that a section 28(1) authorisation presented by Advocate Andrea Johnson is a fabrication she never prepared. She also testified that lead investigator Colonel Brian Padayachee does not know how to investigate, and that suspended Police Minister Senzo Mchunu held private meetings with Johnson about “cleaning up” Crime Intelligence. Multiple other threads, including a forklift procurement probe, an unreferred investigation into a minister’s chief of staff, and a missing docket, point to the same pattern.
Drushantha Ramsamy returned to the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry on 5 August and delivered testimony that reaches well beyond the IDAC leadership dispute the commission has spent months examining.
Ramsamy opened by addressing viral criticism of her demeanour during her first appearance, telling the commission she would rather laugh than cry on the stand because she does not want to appear a victim while assisting the inquiry.
She then turned to a section 28(1) authorisation that Andrea Johnson presented to the commission, dated 30 May 2025. Ramsamy testified she did not prepare that document. She said Johnson only instructed her to draft an authorisation on 27 May, and that she sent her version on 3 June, with an electronic trail to prove it. She described the document Johnson produced as a complete fabrication and asked the commission for an ink age analysis of Johnson’s signature on it.
That authorisation is not an isolated paperwork dispute. On 30 May, at around 11:30, Lieutenant Colonel Khumalo received a call from IDAC chief investigator Dylan Perumal requesting the cellphones of Vusimuzi Matlala, who is currently on trial for attempted murder in a separate matter before the Johannesburg High Court. Those devices form part of the evidence in that case.
Ramsamy was also asked directly whether Colonel Brian Padayachee, the investigator running the matter on the ground, knows how to investigate. Her answer was no. She said she repeatedly had to remind Padayachee that he held the same rank as fellow investigator Mantsha Rapeshu, not the position of chief investigator, and that he once told her he was still new to the work and needed guidance. A commissioner put it to her that this matched what General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi had already told the commission about Padayachee. Ramsamy agreed.
The testimony then moved to suspended Police Minister Senzo Mchunu. Ramsamy said Mchunu had a specific interest in an investigation into the alleged irregular purchase of two forklifts, worth more than R700,000, using Crime Intelligence secret funds. She said Perumal consulted a witness in that matter without her knowledge, and that the witness had been flown from Pretoria to the Eastern Cape at the minister’s arrangement, facilitated by his chief of staff, Cedric Nkabinde.
Ramsamy described a private meeting between Johnson and Mchunu at his residence, at which Johnson told her team the minister wanted to clean up SAPS and Crime Intelligence specifically. Johnson initially denied to the commission that the meeting had taken place, and only acknowledged it once confronted with evidence.
According to Ramsamy, after that meeting Johnson instructed her to gather information on Nkabinde, the same official who had been present. No formal complaint or referral against him existed. A report compiled by IDAC data analyst Peter White later showed Nkabinde had received an Audi and cash from a service provider under separate investigation, but the inquiry that produced those findings had started on nothing more than Johnson’s discomfort from the private meeting.
A separate thread concerns the forklift matter itself. Ramsamy testified that on 22 January 2025, Perumal told the team the Hawks would take over that investigation and IDAC would step back. In April, she discovered affidavits taken by Perumal and Padayachee on the same matter after that date. She asked whether the original docket, known as the Langlaagte docket and containing the only documentary evidence submitted by complainant Fadiel Adams, had been returned to IDAC. She received no answer.
Ramsamy also referenced messages Adams showed the team during a January consultation, which he said came from General Mkhwanazi, warning that Mchunu would be arrested if the task team investigating Crime Intelligence was shut down. Ramsamy did not read the messages herself and relied on Adams’s account of their content.
A further gap emerged around Parliament. Perumal told Ramsamy that a meeting with DA MP Ian Cameron had gone well and that Cameron gave his full support. Cameron’s own sworn affidavit, produced at the commission, says something narrower: that he suspected SAPS management may have misled his committee on unspecified questions, and recommended comparing the meeting recording against the crime intelligence files. It does not reference removing any official.
Ramsamy noted that three people who raised concerns during the investigation, Rapeshu, Serunye and herself, were each subsequently removed from the matters involved.
The commission is expected to put Ramsamy’s allegations to Johnson under a Rule 3 notice.
