THE CORRUPTION OF THE
SOUTH AFRICAN JUDICIARY
Executive Summary
Deputy Chief Justice Dunstan Mlambo:
- is an unconvicted habitual criminal,1
- is utterly corrupt and morally degenerate at the intersection of his official and private life,2 and,
- has a corrupt political relationship with President Cyril Ramaphosa in violation of his oath of judicial independence.3
In sum, to put it in crisp technical terms, Mlambo DCJ is a crooked sack of shit.
FOOTNOTES
1. On 19 February 2024, Constitutional Court Justice Elizabeth Nkabinde (ret.) and Supreme Court of Appeal Justice Ephraim Makgoka, serving on the Appeal Committee of the Judicial Service Commission's Judicial Conduct Committee, found Adv Anthony Brink's four criminal complaints against then-Gauteng High Court Division Judge President Dunstan Mlambo facially well made and answerable on the documentary and other evidence adduced against him, and recommended at the conclusion of their comprehensive 42-page review and assessment of it all, along with Mlambo JP's unsupported, objectively contradicted, manifestly untruthful and consequently unsatisfactory and unconvincing responses, that he be tried on Brink's criminal charges before a judicial disciplinary Tribunal appointed by the President. See material excerpts of the decision. All documents in the case are linked in THE MLAMBO DCJ CASE section below.
2. The Personal-Professional Corruption of Mlambo DCJ. Please note that this article is unsuitable for women and children.
It details also how Mlambo JP's boy on the JSC, Tembeka Ngcukaitobi SC, helpfully cleared the unwelcome obstacle posed to the President's plans to promote his reliably bent judge to the Deputy Chief Justice post, namely the problem of Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka's inconvenient finding that he had a case to answer before a Tribunal on Brink's four criminal charges, by:
- immediately poisoning the conference held by the JSC to debate the said senior judges’ annoying ruling and recommendation against Mlambo JP by grievously defaming Brink to discredit him personally and distract from the objectively clear merits of his criminal charges that Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka had recognised in their lengthy analysis of the evidence, so as to bias his fellow commissioners in Mlambo JP's favour by colouring the latter as the aggrieved, wrongly accused party in the matter;
- perverting the proper disposal of the proceedings by deliberately flouting the audi alteram partem rule to Brink's and the public's fatal prejudice, despite JSC chairman Chief Justice Raymond Zondo's insistent objection to this flagrant illegality and his warning that it would expose the obviously unlawful proceedings to judicial review and to being set aside for breaching this elementary principle of natural justice;
- casually tossing Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka's meticulously detailed findings against Mlambo JP into the can without debating them; and
- agitating and voting for Mlambo JP's acquittal of Brink's ironclad criminal case against him (Zondo CJ and two other commissioners dissenting) with the fantastically dishonest, unbelievably stupid line that, contra Justices Nkabinde and Makgoka's opposite conclusion on a conspectus of all the evidence, Brink had presented no answerable case against Mlambo JP at all.
The article further details how, after Ngcukaitobi SC and his openly prejudiced political faction on the JSC obligingly cleared the way for the criminal judge and he became Deputy Chief Justice the following year, Mlambo DCJ reciprocated the favour performed by the corrupt lawyer in covering for his crimes by fixing him an unprecedented acting appointment directly from the Bar to the Constitutional Court.
3. Project Justice canvasses Mlambo DCJ's corrupt political relationship with President Cyril Ramaphosa – himself notoriously financially and otherwise corrupt and shamelessly mendacious about it, and soon to be impeached and sacked by Parliament for this – and it details some of the corrupt services Mlambo DCJ performed for the President, for which he was rewarded with an appointment as the country's Deputy Chief Justice over all the heads of his more senior colleagues in the Supreme Court of Appeal and Constitutional Court following a transparently rigged selection process (see Menu). This article will be expanded with more information shortly.
Reader, are you enjoying the New South Africa enough yet?
Allegations of dishonesty against judges are serious. Thus, they should never be made unless there is evidence to support them.
Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.
As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.
Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ'd only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv'd, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.
Oh what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive.
The cover-up is always worse than the crime.
Judges ... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.
The law is a web for small flies, the hornets burst through.
INTRODUCTION
The documents posted on this website chiefly concern the criminal, personal-professional, and political corruption of Dunstan Mlambo, Deputy Chief Justice and member of the Constitutional Court; delegated chairman of the Judicial Service Commission's Judicial Conduct Committee; former Judge President of the Gauteng High Court Division, and before that, of the Labour and Labour Appeal Courts; former chairman of the Board of Directors of Legal Aid South Africa ('LASA'); and current chairman of the NGO, Community Advice Offices South Africa.
Prodigiously dishonest – he lies as naturally as he breathes – Mlambo DCJ has debauched every state institution he's joined.
Most insidiously he's repeatedly corrupted the Judicial Service Commission's judicial selection and disciplinary functions.
Other judges he's corrupted, and those who've covered for them, feature here too; others as well.
The whole saga beggars belief. Mlambo DCJ's crimes and other capital misconduct involve:
- fraud under common law in lying to the Minister of Justice on multiple counts in a false report that he signed and delivered to deceive him and thereby frustrate and defeat his ultimate executive authority over LASA and thereby pervert the special ministerial enquiry that he'd instituted into recruitment corruption at LASA that Mlambo JP chaired, in which gross corruption he was directly involved on several levels, and LASA's persistent illegal and unconstitutional refusal to comply with requests duly made under the Promotion of Access to Information Act for access to its public records, in which hiding of incriminating documents records show he persistently involved himself;
- the statutory crime of lying to the National Assembly's Justice Portfolio Committee on the same and further counts to the same criminal ends in a separate, subsequent, equally false report that he signed and delivered to deceive Parliament and to frustrate and defeat its ultimate oversight authority over LASA, and to pervert its independently instituted special parliamentary enquiry into the same rampant lawlessness at LASA;
- suborning the perjury of his attorney on affidavit to deceive the Labour Court in a bid to avoid being subpoenaed for cross-examination on his criminal mendacity on display everywhere in his false reports to those high authorities;
- lying on affidavit addressed to the Chief Justice to deceive him and to frustrate, defeat, and pervert a misconduct enquiry into his said crimes and other impeachable misconduct;
- his demonstrated contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, to wit: documented collusion in and connivance at the persistent illegal suppression of duly requested incriminating public records on four successive occasions;
- wholesale disregard for subordinate legislation regulating public corporate governance, direct open interference and involvement as a non-executive chairman of LASA in its recruitment operations, and cronyism/nepotism;
- a completely unrestrained private life and reciprocating his mistresses' favours by fixing them appointments to judicial posts, and also to judicial conduct Tribunals in which his career-rival in one case and the accused (by him) in another were the respondent judges, the better to corruptly fix the proceedings so as to eliminate his rival in the first case, and in the second to secure the conviction of the other judge whose version of events was diametrically contrary to his;
- a corrupt political relationship with President Cyril Ramaphosa, in the course of which he has rendered grossly improper, dishonest, and illegal favours in violation of his oath of office as a judge;
- importuning another judge, Waglay JP (now retired), to dismiss a case in whose outcome he had a direct interest, without regard to its merits, more specifically by improperly influencing Waglay JP by way of an unsigned, anonymous, unstamped 'memorandum' attacking Brink and lying about the merits of the matter, slipped to him under the counter (inadvertently but fortunately left in the court file), which favour Waglay JP performed for his long-time judicial brother on the turn, even before all the prescribed papers had been filed, and without the knowledge of the two other judges Davis and Sutherland JJA fraudulently named in the fake dismissal order (see 'The Waglay JP case' below);
- rewarding the cover-up of his corruption by the JSC with irregular career advancement.
The entire rotten affair involves repeated shows of judicial group loyalty, dishonestly closed ranks, and consequent criminal impunity.
And it involves persistent and repeated reprisal, intimidation, and attempted witness suppression and elimination, Mafia-style, hit after hit, in keeping with the now traditional culture of murdering corruption whistleblowers in the New South Africa.
Here's the evidence.
You be the judge.
THE MLAMBO DCJ CASE
In mid-2017, Brink filed eight gross misconduct complaints against Mlambo JP (as he then was), four of them charging serious crimes, to wit: suborning perjury; repeatedly conniving at and colluding in the illegal and unconstitutional suppression of public records duly requested under the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2 of 2000 ('PAIA') to obstruct an investigation of jobs-for-pals recruitment corruption at LASA in which Mlambo JP was centrally involved; and deceptively false reporting on multiple scores to the Justice Minister (fraud), and then to the Justice Portfolio Committee of the National Assembly (a statutory crime), to put down and pervert the special enquiries they'd separately and independently instituted into this corruption and its cover-up, involving inter alia the said persistent illegal and unconstitutional withholding of duly requested records to hinder its exposure.
The above-linked document archive contains all further papers filed in the Mlambo JP case, including the criminally false affidavit he deposed to and submitted to the Chief Justice to defeat the first of the eight complaints, in which he told objectively contradicted, provable lies. And it includes Judicial Conduct Committee ('JCC') member Dumisani Zondi JA's 'patently dishonest' attempt (in the language of retired Constitutional Court judge Johann Kriegler about another judge) to sweep Brink's impeachable and jailable complaints against Mlambo JP under the rug.
On 10 December 2021, a JCC appeal committee comprising Elizabeth Nkabinde J of the Constitutional Court (ret.), Ephraim Makgoka JA of the Supreme Court of Appeal, and Margaret Victor J* of Mlambo JP's Gauteng Division of the High Court met to consider Brink's appeal against this stunt; and on 19 February 2024 the former two upheld Brink's appeal against the dismissal of his criminal and other capital charges against Mlambo JP, to wit that he'd lied to the National Assembly to pervert a special enquiry it had instituted at Brink's instance, lied likewise to the Justice Minister to the same corrupt end, and that he'd suborned his attorney to make and file a perjured affidavit on his behalf, on his authority, and on his instructions, in a court case – and recommended that the complaints be further investigated and tried by a Judicial Conduct Tribunal. (*Victor J somehow got replaced afterwards by Mathopo J, who dissented. The JSC has no record of this irregular substitution, or of when and how it occurred.)
The JCC Appeal Committee delivered its decision to uphold Brink's appeal on 19 February 2024. The Sunday Times reported this on 10 March (street poster), as did the SABC online and on national television and radio. (Note: Brink's complaints, including that Mlambo JP lied on multiple scores to Parliament to pervert its special enquiry (a crime) were allocated to a single judge to decide on the patently false basis that they were 'serious, but not impeachable'. The case was allocated to Betty Molemela JA, who failed to decide it, after which it was passed to Dumisani Zondi JA. Covering for Mlambo JP, Zondi JA then acquitted him of Brink's charges, without properly investigating them, as the JCC appeal committee later duly found.)
Brink's appealed against Zondi JA's decision and filed his invited submissions on his appeal.
On 6 May 2024, the JSC conveyed its rejection of the recommendation, claiming ludicrously falsely that 'there is no prima facie evidence to substantiate the allegations' made by Brink in his four most serious criminal and other capital complaints, all documented, which the JCC had contrariwise found well made on the evidence Brink had adduced and consequently answerable before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal; see the JSC's letter to Brink and its press release. Brink's response was requested by the Sunday newspapers, but not published. The SABC reported on the JSC's rejection of the JCC's findings and recommendation. Here's journalist Karyn Maughan's (paywalled) report about it.
Reader, after examining these marked up material excerpts from the JCC appeal committee's 42-page decision, in which those two top judges carefully evaluated Brink's charges in light of the cogent evidence he indeed provided and completely substantiated with supporting documents, do you also think, like the JSC claimed to do, that Brink's documented criminal and other capital complaints against Mlambo JP are unsubstantiated – diametrically contradicting Judges Nkabinde and Makgoka's very opposite findings reported in their commendably detailed and considered decision?
Testing the integrity of the JSC's patently false alleged finding that Brink hadn't provided the JCC with evidence to found a prima facie case against Mlambo JP, and of its decision to reject the JCC appeal committee's contrary findings and recommendation, Brink filed a searching request for JSC records under the Promotion of Access to Information Act on 1 July 2024.
The JSC's response two months later revealed what a farcical, utterly lawless abortion its proceedings were when the matter came up for discussion.
To his credit, the transcript shows that (a) Raymond Zondo CJ very properly urged and later voted, along with two other unidentified commissioners, for the adjournment of the matter to afford Brink an opportunity to address the masses of new evidence, including many documents, that Mlambo JP grossly irregularly and very prejudicially wove, unsworn, into his fantastically dishonest 223-page submissions; but (b) Zondo CJ and those two other commissioners were outvoted nine to three, despite his explicit warning to his fellow commissioners that in such an event Brink would surely take the whole unlawful shambles on judicial review and that the JSC's decision would be overturned, like so many others in the past. (Nope, other strategic plans instead.)
But Zondo CJ was less concerned about defending Brink's right to natural justice in the decision of the matter (by observing the audi alteram partem rule) than to protect his, his fellow judges', and his JSC's reputation – as witness the manner in which at the Judges Conference in December 2023 he rushed to defend Mlambo JP and to rubbish Brink's corruption complaints against him, in the news at the time, without having examined and assessed them, lying also that he'd never been provided with any evidence of Mlambo JP's corruption, even as Brink had written several letters about his long unresolved judicial corruption complaints both to him and to former Chief Justice Mogoeng, who would have passed them down to him as then-JCC chairman to deal with.
All in keeping with his untruthful prevarication reported by the Star newspaper on 7 February 2022 in a frontpage headline article detailing how he'd initially denied ever having met former President Jacob Zuma, then claimed he couldn't remember having done so, then admitted that he had, but claiming he couldn't remember why. The article (legible text) discussed the implications of his appalling tergiversation about this. Zuma issued a public statement about it, to which Zondo DCJ responded with a statement of his own, trying to weasel out of it very unconvincingly.
THE WAGLAY JP CASE
In July 2017, Brink filed an outright judicial corruption complaint against Basheer Waglay JP (now retired), then head of the Labour and Labour Appeal Courts. Attached to the complaint is the anonymous 'memorandum' slipped to him behind the scenes that suborned him to toss Brink's petition for leave to appeal the dismissal of his labour case, plus the court registrar's certification of an inventory of the file's contents, including this criminal instrument left at the scene of the crime.
The 'memorandum' was almost certainly written and delivered by Mlambo JP (as he then was), Waglay JP's long-time colleague in those courts and predecessor as head of them, having regard to the classic test of motive, ability, and opportunity in assessing circumstantial evidence indicating a likely culprit. For reasons explained in the complaint, Mlambo JP had a direct interest in seeing the appeal fail; and, besides him, no one else at LASA had the power, influence and connections to get to Waglay JP behind the scenes and to corrupt him in this way.
Waglay JP promptly obliged his judicial chum by dismissing the petition on the turn, even before all the prescribed papers had been filed and the matter was ripe for decision; without considering its merits, such as, just for starters, the trial judge's most basic mistake in misallocating the final burden of proof (which he frankly conceded afterwards, and LASA itself admitted), completely vitiating his judgment. And he dismissed the case without the involvement, let alone concurrence, of the other two appeal judges, Davis and Sutherland JJA, falsely named in the fraudulently issued dismissal order, who in truth were presiding in different courts in distant cities when the decision was allegedly taken en banc.
How do you suppose KwaZulu-Natal judge Daya Pillay J (now retired) reacted to the clear-cut documentary evidence of all this? By recoiling in horror at the rank judicial corruption in the court she used to work in, described and vouched in the application papers before her? Or by reflexively closing ranks around her former judicial brother in the Labour Court, Waglay JP, and by vindictively gunning down the messenger reporting this judicial corruption to her? Find out here.
CORRESPONDENCE
Brink wrote repeatedly to then-JSC chairperson Mogoeng CJ (now retired) and then-JCC chairperson Zondo DCJ to no avail to protest the JCC's unlawful and unconstitutional failure to decide his capital complaints against Mlambo and Waglay JJP. (Scroll down the linked page to 'Correspondence'.) Most important is the first letter (with its annexures) to Mogoeng CJ.
The political heat generated by the specimen draft intelligence report that Brink drew and submitted to the Director-General of the State Security Agency got his appeal against the eventual dismissal of his complaints against Mlambo JP finally decided in Brink's favour.
In January 2025, Brink wrote yet again, now to current JSC chairperson Maya CJ, about the JCC's failure to decide his complaint in mid-2017 against Waglay JP. Patricia Goliath DJP's undated decision of the complaint was allegedly 'found' in the case file by the JSC Secretary a couple of weeks later.
Brink's letter to Maya CJ; Goliath's contemptible, perverse decision; and Brink's very forthright notice of appeal soon afterwards in March and then equally forthright submissions on the merits are linked here.
On 19 December 2025, the JCC Appeal Committee upheld Brink's appeal – not on the merits, but on the technical ground that the complaint had been dealt with under the wrong section of the JSC Act, just as Brink had pointed out – and referred the matter back to JCC chairman Mlambo DCJ, himself directly implicated in the gargantuan judicial corruption in question. The appeal has yet to be decided.
THE FULLER PICTURE
See the CONTENTS MENU for more unimaginable horrors.