General Fannie Masemola cannot wait for Monday. After almost six months away from his desk, the national police commissioner is preparing to return to work, and his relief is unmistakable. “Yes, I cannot wait for Monday. I am happy to be back to serve the people of South Africa,” he told Business Day, after President Cyril Ramaphosa lifted his precautionary suspension on Friday.
The suspension had kept Masemola from performing his duties since he was charged by the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (Idac), during the tenure of advocate Andrea Johnson at its helm. That case has now collapsed. Masemola, reflecting on it from the vantage point of a man whose career and reputation hung in the balance, believes something larger was at play. “I do not know what the motive was; I feel, of course, they [had] a greater plan in terms of what they intended on doing. Obviously not only me, but I think they were executing a bigger plan, which only they know. Maybe one day we will know what the plan was, but it did not succeed. My plan is to continue serving South Africans,” he said.
For Masemola personally, the stakes were considerable. Under Johnson, who has since resigned, Idac charged him with four counts of breaching the Public Finance Management Act. He was later joined in the corruption case of a R228m tender awarded to Medicare24, a company owned by criminal suspect Vusimusi “Cat” Matlala, together with 15 other suspects. As the police accounting officer, he stood accused of failing to take effective and appropriate steps to prevent unauthorised, irregular and wasteful expenditure and losses resulting from the tender.
The unraveling of that case came through testimony at the Madlanga commission of inquiry into allegations of criminal infiltration of the country’s justice system. Idac state prosecutor Drushantha Ramsamy told the commission how Johnson “orchestrated attacks” against Masemola and other generals. The testimony went further. Johnson allegedly even tried to trick Masemola into lying before parliament, and wanted investigators to look into his daughter to see whether she was linked to corruption-accused Matlala, without any sound legal basis. For a family drawn into an allegation with no legal footing, the human toll of a prosecution built on shifting ground is hard to overstate.
Johnson herself told the commission that the heart of the case rested on allegations that Masemola was slow to act. But evidence before the commission points the other way. It suggests Masemola terminated the tender within weeks after a preliminary audit report was issued by the police’s head of risk, Charity Matlala-Matlou, in which irregularities were flagged. When Johnson appeared at the commission, she failed to pinpoint the legal basis for Idac’s decision for Masemola to join the corruption case, given that he did not face any corruption charges.
Commission chair Mbuyiseli Madlanga did not mince words about what that failure meant. Without any legal basis for the joinder, he said, the directorate’s aim “must have been to embarrass him, to taint him and to make or cause the public to see him as also being complicit in fraud and corruption”. The consequences of that finding now extend beyond one man’s reputation. Idac’s decision to charge Masemola has been referred to judge Takalani Joseph Raulinga, who will investigate the circumstances relating to the prosecution team’s assessment of the evidence, the enrolment of the matter and the application of the law, to determine any misconduct.
The clash that preceded the charges was public and bitter. In the months leading to Masemola being charged, Johnson and top police officials were at odds, including KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lt-Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, who accused the directorate of acting outside its mandate in pursuing cases against senior police.
Now, as Masemola prepares to resume his duties, his focus is on the road ahead rather than the wreckage behind him. South Africa has a list of police commissioners who left the post without finishing their terms, and Masemola is determined not to join them. His term concludes in 2027, and he intends to see it through. More details of his account and the events surrounding the collapsed case can be found at https://www.businessday.co.za/news/2026-10-16-masemola-says-idac-was-executing-a-bigger-plan-but-failed/