The Madlanga Commission of Inquiry will obtain a statement from socialite Serge Cabonge after an audio recording, played in open court on Tuesday, 13 October 2026, captured him allegedly boasting that he used his police connections to make criminal charges disappear.
Commission spokesperson Jeremy Michaels confirmed the move in a statement issued on Tuesday, saying the inquiry had noted the voice recordings attributed to Cabonge, which were played during former deputy national police commissioner Shadrack Sibiya's bail hearing at the Randburg Magistrate's Court. The recordings had first been reported by IOL.
What the recording allegedly reveals
According to IOL, the roughly 25-minute recording captures a conversation between Cabonge and a man identified in court only as Mr M, whose identity is being withheld to protect his teenage daughter. Sibiya faces allegations of rape, the sexual grooming of a minor and human trafficking, and the state is opposing his release on bail.
During the conversation, Cabonge allegedly described a close relationship with a man he said sat in the front row of the Madlanga Commission hearings. He claimed that man had previously been a judge president, and that he had helped the family when the man's daughter faced charges after a collision in Sandton involving a woman carrying a child.
Cabonge allegedly said the woman's mother approached him for help once police began making inquiries into the incident. He claimed he obtained the case number, contacted people to check on the matter and used his connections to intervene. In his account, the case was withdrawn within about a week of his involvement.
The recording did not name the man allegedly linked to the commission, and no name was mentioned during the conversation.
The commission responds
Michaels said Cabonge had previously been mentioned at hearings before the commission, and it would now engage with him directly.
Mr Cabonge has previously been mentioned at hearings before the Commission. The Commission will engage with Mr Cabonge and obtain his statement as part of its broad investigation into matters falling within its terms of reference and his mention of the Commission in the recording.
Michaels said the commission would make no further comment at this stage. The Sowetan, which also reported the development, described Cabonge as a Congolese socialite at the centre of damning allegations emerging from the Sibiya proceedings.
Why the recording ended up in court
Detective-Sergeant Nokukhanya Ndlovu, the investigating officer in Sibiya's case, told the court that Mr M had confirmed the conversation was his and that the recording was authentic, according to IOL. Ndlovu said the recording had allegedly been sent to Sibiya's wife, Sizakele Dlamini, and that she had been verifying an affidavit submitted by Dlamini along with supporting documents from the defence.
The detective said she was also investigating whether Mr M had previously stated that the case involving his daughter had been withdrawn.
Sibiya's lawyer, Estelle Killian SC, questioned why the recording was being played in court at all, given that Sibiya was not the subject of the conversation. The defence later indicated it no longer wished to introduce the recording and had made it available to the state. The court heard that the investigation into the recording, including the circumstances of an accompanying note, remains ongoing.
Who gets justice, and who gets favours?
Let us be clear about what is at stake here. If a well-connected man can pick up a phone, quote a case number, and make a criminal charge evaporate within a week, then the criminal justice system is not broken for everyone. It works very well indeed for those with the right friends. It is ordinary Black South Africans, without socialites or retired judges on speed dial, who feel the full weight of that same system every day.
This is precisely the rot the Madlanga Commission was established to probe. Its mandate covers criminality, political interference and corruption within South Africa's criminal justice system, and its official records, transcripts and rulings are published on its site. A recording in which one man casually describes charges being made to vanish at the request of a powerful family is exactly the kind of evidence the commission exists to examine.
The echoes of our past are impossible to ignore. Under apartheid, justice was never blind; it simply looked away for some people and stared down others. Three decades into democracy, allegations like these raise the uncomfortable question of how much of that culture of privilege and connection survives inside the very institutions meant to dismantle it.
The commission's decision to obtain a statement from Cabonge signals that it intends to establish further details about his claims and about his reference to a person allegedly connected to its own proceedings. Whether that statement leads anywhere depends on the political will behind an inquiry that has already cast its net across the upper ranks of policing, as we examined in our coverage of