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South Africa, Our Burning Planet

Revealed: David Mabuza, Fred Daniel and the missing crime dockets

7 Aug 2022

Just days after Daily Maverick implicated Nonhlanhla Patience Mnisi, the wife of Deputy President David Mabuza, in a land claims scam in Mpumalanga, the Hawks told whistle-blower Fred Daniel that the matter would be investigated. By our reckoning, the circumstantial evidence pointed to one place – but a few months (and a few crucial missing court dockets) later, it seems the investigation has run out of steam.

The General

Early on the morning of 22 March 2022, a Tuesday, conservationist Fred Daniel received a message from Brigadier Desmond Alexander of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigations, known as the Hawks.

It was an unexpected message and Daniel had good reason to be suspicious, but the weight of its contents could not be denied.

Alexander’s boss, he informed Daniel, had just tasked the Serious Corruption Offences unit with looking into his “matter”.

“What are the chances,” asked the brigadier, “that we can meet on Thursday, perhaps with your lawyer, for an introduction and discussion?”

As Daniel understood it, the reason for the urgency was the exposé that had been published a few days earlier by Daily Maverick – a conclusion he had drawn from a series of follow-up calls with Alexander.

Headlined Case number 35402/2010 – the Mabuzas and the giant Mpumalanga land claims ‘scam’, the article was centred on the revelation that Deputy President David Mabuza’s wife, Patience Nonhlanhla Mnisi, had received “substantial commissions” on a sale of hotly contested land in the Badplaas region of the province.

Given the intricacies of the investigation, with the evidence filling three lever-arch files, the final article was 6,500 words. Fundamentally, this was because Daily Maverick had been compelled to follow the trail all the way back to 2004, when Daniel – who was the owner of Nkomazi Wilderness, a private nature reserve near Badplaas, at the time – had first blown the whistle on the fast-evolving land claims scam.

Along the way, up to the evidential core of our narrative in 2015, we had encountered a hijacked community trust, spurious land claims, brazen conmen and the obvious collusion of Pam Golding Properties, Mnisi’s employer.

In line with Daily Maverick’s long-running coverage of Daniel’s R1-billion civil suit against the government, which listed the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency as the first of 24 defendants, the article also emphasised how the scam had led directly to the breakdown of the province’s biodiversity.

Beyond that, quoting from an expert report of Judge Willem Heath, the article noted how the land fraud had hollowed out Mpumalanga’s public institutions, costing the country about R35-billion in lost investment and revenue.

Throughout the article, the intimidating presence of Mabuza loomed large. Aside from the ongoing harassment and death threats faced by Daniel and his family, Daily Maverick linked Mabuza’s name to the murder of campaigners against illegal land grabs in the province (not exactly a new allegation).

But perhaps most significantly, in light of the multiple criminal charges that were laid during the years that Mabuza was serving as the premier of Mpumalanga, we contacted the Hawks for an update.

“[We] have no record of such an investigation,” Brigadier Nomthandazo Mbambo, the directorate’s spokesperson, informed us.

But less than three days after publication of our exposé, it appeared that the Hawks were “very interested”. Alexander’s boss, he informed Daniel via WhatsApp, was Major General Kubandran Moodley, the directorate’s head of serious corruption investigations.

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For the next few months, after he had assigned a pair of senior colonels to the team, Daniel would find himself in regular contact with the general.

At first, the interchanges were friendly and light. On 8 May 2022, for example, Daniel sent Moodley a pin location for a meeting the following day, to which the general responded with “prayer-hands” and “thumbs-up” emojis. But by June, a cold wind had begun to blow through the WhatsApp thread.

“I am very worried about my safety and that of my family,” Daniel wrote to Moodley on 10 June, with respect to the fourth session of the civil trial that was shortly due back in court. “My witnesses are being threatened as well as my legal team. Please can we discuss this.”

Moodley replied that he was “in a workshop” and would revert later that afternoon. By 13 July, however, more than a month later, Daniel’s fears had yet to be allayed.

“Had these criminal complaints been properly investigated,” he wrote to the general, “I doubt I would have been in this terrible litigation with my own gov. Please let me or [my advocate] know how best we can deal with this as it represents a constitutional crisis and a risk to my family.”

Indeed, as he explained to Daily Maverick, Daniel had not set out on this path with Moodley to betray him by sharing the correspondence with us. He considered Moodley “a good guy”, he told us, someone who was genuinely interested in bringing the criminals to book. But, Daniel added, he knew better than the general that the complaints laid between 2011 and 2014 – with, specifically, the Mpumalanga division of the South African Police Service (SAPS) – had played a central part in all of the trauma he would later be forced to endure.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Conservationist vs DD Mabuza: Threats ‘likely to escalate’ as resumption of trial looms”

It was with a mixture of foreknowledge and foreboding, therefore, that Daniel read Moodley’s reply to his message of 13 July.

In the response, Moodley explained that he had not been involved “in the investigation of the other matters” handled by the Mpumalanga branch, and that, if he so wished, Daniel had every right to complain to the directorate’s national head or to the National Prosecuting Authority itself. Then, in fast-typed and barely readable prose, the general wrote this [sic, etc]:

“I agreed to help at an head office level due to the lack of mp assisting with these investigation nd the high level of interference as u claimed from senior government officials.”

The interpretation of this sentence could have gone a number of ways. For starters, had Moodley really “agreed” to help? By the evidence of Alexander’s opening message to Daniel on 22 March, it was Moodley who had initiated the investigation off his own bat.

Second, was it due to the lack of assistance from the Mpumalanga branch that Moodley had stepped into the breach, or was this something he had only discovered later? Something, for instance, that was slowing him up?

Finally, and in the same vein, was it Daniel who had “claimed” the interference of senior government officials, or was Moodley now experiencing this same interference in real time?

The Colonels

To answer these fundamental questions – which, we assessed, were the fulcrum in the weighing of Daniel’s allegation of a “constitutional crisis” – it was necessary for Daily Maverick to drill much deeper into the correspondence.

The alleged crisis, of course, was in the security state; and if there really was “no record of such an investigation”, as the Hawks had informed us in March, that would have been the obvious place for us to begin.

And so, once again, to “protect [himself] and his family” by “placing the information in the public domain”, Daniel gave us access to the written communication.

As it turned out, Moodley’s change in attitude and tone, from the pleasantries of early May to the obfuscations of mid-July, appeared to map the timeline of “difficulties” faced by his investigating team. To Daily Maverick, the salient points from the correspondence seemed evident enough.

On 31 May 2022, acting on the advice of Moodley, Daniel’s advocate Jacques Joubert had sent an email to Colonel GB Lekhuleni and Lieutenant-Colonel Tseliso Mokhoema, the investigating officers newly assigned to the case.

In the email, Joubert provided the officers with the case file numbers of three dockets – CAS 28-09-2011, CAS 57-10-2011 and CAS 47-03-2014. All of the dockets, Joubert made clear, were held at the Badplaas police station in Mpumalanga.

“It will make more sense for us to meet if you’re in possession of the said dockets,” Joubert signed off, “to find out why the cases were not prosecuted.”

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Case number 35402/2010 – the Mabuzas and the giant Mpumalanga land claims ‘scam’”

On 8 June 2022, after confirming receipt of Joubert’s email, Lekhuleni sent an email back – with the comforting news that the officers were “going tomorrow to fetch the dockets”. Then he added: “Once we have them and perused [sic] we will advise you on the next step to be taken.”

Nine days later, on 17 June – in a move that appeared to corroborate Daniel’s views on the pure intentions of Moodley – Lekhuleni played open cards.

“We went to collect the dockets from Badplaas police station,” he wrote to Joubert, “and it’s disturbing to note that the original dockets could not be found. We were given only two useless files by the station purporting to be the case dockets, which cannot take our investigation anywhere. I’m suggesting that you come to the office next week with your complainant statement so we can register a new case.”

So there it was, proof that the case files had gone missing. As they would later inform Daily Maverick, although Daniel and Joubert weren’t surprised by this outcome, it was “shocking” to have their suspicions confirmed. They appeared to have recovered quickly, however, because Joubert fired an email back that same afternoon.

“Thank you for your prompt response,” he began. “Fortunately, we have copies of the contents of the dockets, including the warning statements, so you can reconstruct the dockets easily.”

What Joubert meant by “warning statements”, he explained to Daily Maverick, was that the individuals named in the case dockets had subsequently been charged with the alleged crimes. In other words, the evidence had been forwarded to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which, at that early stage, was satisfied that it should form the basis of a criminal trial.

In this context, acknowledging that the colonels had only found two files, Joubert asked them in his reply which one they could not find. He also asked if the files indicated why the cases had been removed from the roll.

The final email in the thread was sent by Lekhuleni on 20 June: “I hold a different view on how we should deal with this matter going forward. The dockets that you asked us to get from the station are obviously not helping us in taking your complaint forward. The police CAS system shows that the [dockets] were withdrawn in court and became missing while in the custody of the police.”

Next, in a series of bullet points, Lekhuleni laid out how the Hawks had decided to manage the situation.

“[You] must approach the NPA and ask for an explanation on why the cases were withdrawn,” he stated. “If the NPA decides to review the decision of the previous prosecutor, you can give them the copies of the docket that you have. I guess that will reactivate [the process].”

In the following point, however, Lekhuleni appeared to contradict himself. He informed Joubert that neither he nor Mokhoema “preferred” to be involved in the “reconstruction” of the dockets — since, he explained, the complaints laid between 2011 and 2014 had been assigned to different officers. Once again, Lekhuleni suggested that Joubert or Daniel compile a new affidavit.

After that had been done, Lekhuleni added, the Hawks would open an inquiry. If the allegations were “supported by the collected evidence”, he concluded, a new case docket would be opened and enrolled in court.

It was, as Daniel feared, a stalemate. As Daily Maverick was aware from our previous reporting, Daniel had already approached the NPA for a review of the decision. On 21 February 2019, in a letter from Daniel’s attorneys to the office of Advocate Shamila Batohi, the NPA’s recently appointed chief, a formal request had been made to reinstate “the corruption related, common law charges”.

In the same letter, Daniel’s attorneys had requested Batohi to “expand the existing charges to include contraventions of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act no 12 of 2004 (Precca) and the Prevention Against Organised Crime Act no 121 of 1998 (Poca) and to add further suspects who should be on trial with the current accused.”

The main additional suspect to which the letter had referred was, it so happened, none other than Deputy President Mabuza.

“The above request,” the attorneys had explained to Batohi, “is based on compelling evidence that Mr DD Mabuza [in his previous capacity] as MEC for Agriculture and Land Affairs [in Mpumalanga] orchestrated a violent protest in Badplaas and the evidence that Mr Mabuza instructed his office to pay an amount of R3.3-million to his business partner and corruption kingpin, Mr Pieter Visagie.

“Unless Mr Mabuza is able to provide a lawful explanation of this payment to Visagie, he should with respect be put on trial with the other accused.”

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Claws out for DD ‘The Cat’ Mabuza as his past comes back to haunt him”

There was no response to this request from Batohi’s office, neither was there confirmation of the letter’s receipt. The civil trial, however, which would kick off in winter 2021, would clearly demonstrate Mabuza’s involvement in the violent protest, as well as the payment to Visagie.

III. The Charges

What, then, were the contents of the original dockets?

In effect, CAS 28-09-2011 and CAS 57-10-2011 had set down, in a format supposedly acceptable to the Hawks and the NPA, the full narrative of malfeasance as published by Daily Maverick in March 2022.

The charge sheet in the former, CAS 28-09-2011, had named Visagie as one of six accused in the hijacking of the Ndwandwa Community Trust, which had initially been set up to consolidate the restituted land of claimants in the Badplaas region.

According to the evidence of the trust’s founder, Robert Nkosi, the title deed had been removed from the master of the high court’s file “under the pretence that the trust was to be amended”.

Nkosi’s extensive affidavits, which formed a central pillar of CAS 28-09-2011, showed how the master of the high court was “duped into issuing new letters of authority” because he believed that the originals had been stolen.

“The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Ndwandwa Community Trust was hijacked as a vehicle to milk the land reform funds,” Nkosi testified, “and when I refused to be part of the scheme the [regional land claims commission] officials and other officials conspired with Mr Visagie, who wanted me out of the way.”

From there, the narrative jumped to a company under the grandiose name of Investment for Agricultural Sustainability in Africa, or Ifasa, which was listed as the first accused in the charge sheet of CAS 28-09-2011.

Ifasa was registered by Gustav de Waal, who also happened to be the second accused on the charge sheet. In early 2010, according to the evidence, Ifasa partnered with the Ndwandwa Community Trust, knowing that its letters of authority were fake.

One of the aims of the partnership was to purchase 12,000 hectares in the south of Nkomazi Wilderness — which Daniel, although he’d retained partial ownership, had recently sold to Emirati company Dubai World.

The case docket had further demonstrated how Ifasa’s illegal plan had secured the backing of the Mpumalanga provincial government, with Mabuza at the helm.

In 2013, although a civil court had by then ordered the fake trustees to resign, the NPA mysteriously dropped the case. Two years later, Daniel received word that the same 12,000 hectares had been sold behind his back to the government, with the Badplaas office of Pam Golding Properties acting as the broker — Mabuza’s wife, Mnisi, was at the time (and remains) a leading agent in this office.

As for CAS 57-10-2011, the missing contents had once been about the inflation of land prices in Mpumalanga. Here, Visagie was named by Nkosi as the architect of the scam.

Backed up by testimony from both Daniel and attorney Richard Spoor, evidence was provided that Visagie, acting on behalf of the Mpumalanga government, had approached dozens of Badplaas farmers with a deal they couldn’t refuse — the only condition for the sale, the documents proved, was that the farmers could not dispute any fake claims. Time and again, after the sales had gone through, the docket had shown how Visagie had then split the difference in the hugely inflated on-sale to the regional land claims commission.

But while CAS 28-09-2011 and CAS 57-10-2011 were about criminal activities that had occurred in the past, the original contents of CAS 47-03-2014 referred to a crime that was still ongoing. This later case, opened by forensic investigator Paul O’Sullivan, had focused on an illegal fence that Dubai World had erected in Nkomazi Wilderness soon after the acquisition from Daniel.

And like the 2011 cases, it turned out, Daily Maverick had already covered the back-story to this gutted docket.

In 2007, when he was still the full owner of Nkomazi Wilderness, Daniel had commissioned two separate reports on the land’s carrying capacity for elephant. The first, compiled by environmental consultants International Conservation Services, had concluded that the reserve could sustain one animal per 2,000 hectares. The second, compiled by Professor Wouter van Hoven of the University of Pretoria, had calculated a less-conservative estimate, at one per 1,000 hectares.

In the event, Daniel had planned to introduce a small family herd of eight animals into a fenced-off area of 12,700 hectares, with the intention of monitoring the herd while dropping the fences into the full 39,000-hectare expanse.

With the transfer of the land to Dubai World, however, it wasn’t long before 10 elephants were introduced into a fenced-off area of 5,500-hectares, a situation that had clearly violated the permit conditions of the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency (MTPA).

Among the documents that O’Sullivan had submitted as part of CAS 47-03-2014 was the MTPA’s authorisation, dated 2 October 2007, in which it was stipulated that “[the] area where elephant will be introduced will not be smaller than 12,700ha”.

As Daniel informed Daily Maverick in the winter of 2022, the ecological damage that had since been visited on Nkomazi Wilderness was something that still caused him sleepless nights. Indeed, during the in loco court inspection for the civil trial on 1 February 2022 – at which Daily Maverick was present – the herd was found to number 18 elephants, within the same 5,500ha enclosure. The trees had been stripped bare, and the soil in parts trampled to dust.

For Daniel, this was further evidence that the land claims scam had decimated everything in its path.

According to the plaintiffs’ trial bundle in the civil case, there was a direct link between the MTPA’s willingness to “look the other way” and Dubai World’s decision to play ball with corrupt officials. In this regard, Daniel referred Daily Maverick to an article that was published by the Mail & Guardian in August 2010, with the subheading, “‘Illegal’ fence carves out chunk of world heritage area for livestock”.

The article, written by Yolandi Groenewald, had focused on the Songimvelo Game Reserve – Nkomazi’s neighbour and the largest provincial reserve in the country – where at least ten rhino were known to have died as the result of an illegal fence erected by land claimants.

“A former [MTPA] chief executive, who left under a cloud, allegedly authorised the invasion of the reserve by land claimants, despite the claim not being finalised,” Groenewald had written.

“The Land Claims Commission and Mpumalanga’s department of agriculture, rural development and land administration, then headed by current Mpumalanga Premier David Mabuza, financed the fence.”

The Answers

On Lekhuleni’s insistence that all consultations should take place at the Hawks office in Pretoria, the visitors register for the Serious Corruption Offences unit on 27 June 2022 contained the signatures of Daniel and Joubert.

By Daniel’s telling, perhaps because Moodley wasn’t present, the meeting did not go well. More concerned than ever for his safety, Daniel took out his cellphone and photographed the empty dockets — which signalled an abrupt end to proceedings.

Still, the truth as told by these images was irrefutable. All that remained of CAS 28-09-2011 and CAS 57-10-2011 were a bunch of bank records without context, while the cover sheet of CAS 47-03-2014 stated simply “undetected”. There was, however, a statement from the officer who had been assigned to investigate the illegal fence.

His name was Detective Sergeant Malaza, and when Daily Maverick called the contact number listed on the statement he immediately hung up. What we wanted to ask Malaza was why, in his sworn testimony that he “was not responsible” for misplacing the docket, had he also testified that he could not locate the complainant?

Was O’Sullivan, we wanted to know – whose details had long been listed in the public domain – all of a sudden impossible to find?

It also seemed anomalous that the sergeant had marked the date for commencement of the investigation as 1 September 2008, when the copy of O’Sullivan’s complainant statement was dated 13 March 2014. Was it a coincidence that the violent protest at the gates of Nkomazi Wilderness, in which Mabuza would later be implicated, happened in August 2008?

In this regard, if we had managed to keep him on the call, we might have asked Malaza about his former colleague Kobus Vermeulen, who was the detective inspector caught in the hostage situation at the Badplaas police station in late July 2008 – a situation, as Vermeulen testified before the Pretoria High Court, that had everything to do with land claims.

Did Malaza remember that terrible week, when the protest at the gates of Nkomazi Wilderness had followed, and the Badplaas police – according to the testimony of Vermeulen – had been ordered from on high not to intervene?

Unfortunately, answers to such questions were not forthcoming; not from Malaza, and not from anyone employed by the SAPS. Our questions for Moodley were referred back to Mbambo, the Hawks spokesperson, who told us in return that she would “try to engage” Moodley. The problem, she informed us, was that the general was “not on duty”.

Then, at the final hour, just before this article was going to be published, we received the equally unhelpful word from Mbambo that “both cases” — although we’d sent her the docket numbers for all three — had been “investigated at provincial level and finalised”.

Likewise with the NPA, whose questions for Batohi were referred to Marie Loots, chief prosecutor for the Middelburg cluster in the Mpumalanga office. And it appeared, from the response via Batohi’s media liaison, that only an excised list had been forwarded to Middelburg.

What the national office refused to answer was why they had ignored the formal request from Daniel’s attorneys, sent in February 2019, to reinstate the charges and add Mabuza as a suspect.

That said, regarding the questions that did make it to Loots, we were very eager for answers.

Was the NPA aware of the evidence, recently led in case number 35402/2010 of the Pretoria High Court, that had implicated Mabuza in a number of allegations from the empty or missing case dockets?

Also, was the NPA aware of any undue interference that may have resulted in the cases being removed from the role?

In line with the trend, Loots did not get back to us. The questions sent to the office of the deputy president were disregarded without confirmation of receipt, which left Daily Maverick with little choice but to draw our own conclusions.

And on this score, when it came to the history of suppression and the twisting of the facts — not to mention the outright, provable falsehoods and the displays of contempt for the law — arguably the most-loaded items of information had appeared in a media release issued by the Mpumalanga premier’s office on 3 February 2018.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Assassins, elephants and sweating advocates in Barberton Mountain Lands”

“This matter has nothing to do with Mabuza nor land claims,” the release stated. “If Mr Daniels [sic] with his cohorts have any evidence of any wrong doing in particular of criminal nature [sic], he can lay charges directly with the police Hawks in Pretoria, the Public Protector etc.”

It was circles within circles, laying the ground for similar statements that Mabuza would make after his promotion, on 27 February 2018, to deputy president. But now, putting the circumstantial sword to such evasions was not just the empty or missing dockets, it was the other thing that the release noted: “Mr Mabuza does not even know the full facts on [sic] this apparent dispute between [Daniel] and the MTPA.”

As it so happened, the 2015/2016 annual report of the MTPA had included the following paragraphs at the bottom of page 198, under the heading “Contingencies” and sub-header “Fred Daniel Case A”:

“Following the 2015 resolution of the Mpumalanga Provincial Government Executive Council to centralise the management of critical litigation matters, the Group has during the month of October 2015 transferred the management of this court case to the Premier’s Office through DEDT [Department of Economic Development and Tourism] for further handling. However the liability for legal fees remains with the Group.

“Legal fees in the sum of R6.2 million have been incurred in the matter since its commencement. The Group has made a part payment of those fees leaving a balance of R2.4 million to date.”

In other words, for the simple reason that he had taken control of the civil litigation in 2015 — removing the files from the MTPA yet leaving the agency to pay — Mabuza’s contention three years later that he did not know “the full facts” was a little hard to swallow.

Read more in Daily Maverick: “Conservationist vs Deputy President Mabuza: Fred Daniel gets his R1bn day in court after 11 years”

As for the fees paid to attorney and counsel in the matter, which Daniel was doing out of his own pocket while the South African taxpayer was forking out for the State, Daily Maverick was led back to the alarming context of the 2018 media release.

Daniel, it transpired, had just a few days before obtained an interim protection order against Mabuza, awarded by the magistrate court of the Gert Sibande District in Carolina. Issued with a suspended warrant of arrest, the order had prohibited the politician from engaging in “any verbal or other communication” aimed at causing “mental, psychological, economic or physical harm”.

Since it had also stated in the media release that “Daniel will be exposed as a liar and abuser of our court system to defame innocent people”, on 19 February 2018 the parties were back in court — this time, and once again on his own dime, Daniel’s intention was to enforce Mabuza’s arrest.

But it didn’t happen. A new magistrate, Sarel Grabe, threw the matter out. According to the affidavits of three attendees in court on the day, including former Mpumalanga premier Mathews Phosa, Mabuza’s counsel was observed “in private conversation with [Grabe] in his office, without the presence of counsel for the complainant”.

For Daily Maverick, the pattern was unmistakable. Although the misinformation campaign had lately been widened to include us – with even General Mulangi Mphego, disgraced former spy boss and now Mabuza’s special adviser, launching his own personal attacks – the evidence, for anyone who cared to look, was overwhelming.

It was all in the plaintiffs’ trial bundle for case number 35402/2010 of the Pretoria High Court. And with the fourth and final session of the civil trial due to start on 8 August 2022, it was up to anyone who was paying attention to demand justice. DM/OBP

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South Africa

The General

The Colonels

III. The Charges

The Answers