A year ago this month, a police commissioner sat down in front of a commission of inquiry in Pretoria and started talking. What he described wasn’t the ordinary friction of politics or the usual grumbling about inefficiency. He described collusion — politicians, police, prosecutors, people inside the justice system itself, allegedly working together to protect criminal interests rather than the public. Twelve months and well over a hundred days of testimony later, the Madlanga Commission is still sitting. A whistleblower connected to the case is dead. And South Africans are still waiting to find out what, if anything, changes as a result.
I’ve followed this one closely, not because I have any particular stake in the outcome, but because it keeps returning me to a question I think about often in my own work: what actually happens to a system when the people entrusted with power stop being restrained by ethics, and nobody notices until it’s too late?
What strikes me about this Commission isn’t that South Africa has a corruption problem — most countries, if they looked closely enough, would find some version of the same story. What strikes me is how ordinary it must have felt, from the inside, for as long as it lasted. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to dismantle a justice system. It happens in small increments — a call not made, a docket that goes missing, a person quietly warned not to push too hard. Each step small enough to justify to yourself. It’s only when someone finally speaks, and a commission spends a year pulling the thread, that the size of it becomes visible.
That’s the part I find myself sitting with. Not the scale of the wrongdoing, which is shocking enough on its own, but the gap it exposes — the distance between what an institution says it stands for and what actually happens inside it when nobody’s watching. Codes of conduct, oaths of office, oversight structures: South Africa’s criminal justice system had all of these. They didn’t prevent what the Commission has spent a year uncovering. Written commitments, on their own, protect no one.
I don’t think that’s a South African problem, or even a government problem. I think it’s a human one, and most of us have seen a smaller version of it somewhere — in a workplace where the values on the wall don’t match how people are actually treated, in a leader who says the right things in meetings and does something else entirely once the meeting ends. The mechanism is the same, whether the stakes are a murdered whistleblower or a colleague who gets quietly pushed out for asking the wrong question. Power, left unchecked by genuine ethical conviction, will eventually behave exactly how it wants to.
Which is why I don’t think this story is really about a commission, or even about the people it has implicated. I think it’s about the rest of us — the people reading about it from a distance, forming opinions, and then going back to our own workplaces, our own institutions, our own quiet decisions about what we’ll let slide and what we won’t. It is remarkably easy to be appalled by corruption in a headline and remarkably hard to notice the same instinct in ourselves, in miniature, on an ordinary Tuesday. It happens that this Commission reached its first anniversary the same month South Africa marks Heritage Day — a coincidence, but a useful one. We tend to think of heritage as something we’ve already received: a language, a custom, a piece of history handed to us fully formed. We think less often about the heritage we’re building right now, for people who aren’t born yet, in how we respond to moments exactly like this one.
I don’t know how this Commission ends, or what the coming year of prosecutions and consequences will look like once the final report is written. But I know this much: heritage isn’t only what we inherited from the generations before us — it’s what we’re actively choosing to hand to the ones after us, in real time, through decisions like this one. Whether that inheritance is a justice system people can trust, or one more example of powerful people getting away with it, is not yet decided. It’s being decided now, in how seriously this country follows through, and in how honestly the rest of us examine the smaller versions of the same failure closer to home. That’s a heritage worth taking seriously — not the one we’re given, but the one we’re still, right now,
choosing to build.
Author: Ilene Power (COO, Unashamedly Ethical)
Ilene Power is an admitted advocate of the High Court of South Africa, with over 20 years’ experience as a labour lawyer,
arbitrator and mediator. She is a certified ethics officer and serves as COO and Ethics Officer of Unashamedly Ethical NPC, a
global movement of over 16,000 signatories across 144 countries committed to ethical living. Her work focuses on
institutionalising ethics within organisations — helping leaders move from stated values to lived practice — and she leads UE’s
Ethics in Action programme, its organisational ethics consultancy arm.