What Matlala’s non-answers exposed

The implied corruption behind the ‘coincidences’

- NYANISO QWESHA

SOUTH Africa didn't need another scandal. We're drowning in them. What we needed was clarity. We needed a moment where the fog lifts just long enough for the public to see the machinery behind the mess.

Strangely, Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, with his selective memory and careful silences, has given us exactly that. But the real revelation didn’t come from his testimony. It came from ANC Chief Whip Mdumiseni Ntuli, who calmly listed a string of “coincidences” that should make every South African sit upright.

Let’s stop insulting ourselves. In politics, when leaders lean on the word “coincidence’, it usually means the truth is walking a little too close for comfort.

What Ntuli highlighted wasn't random. It was a pattern. A pattern so obvious that pretending otherwise would require a deliberate suspension of intelligence. Ntuli’s list was damning not because it accused anyone outright, but because it mapped out something far more dangerous: repetition.

The same individuals resurfacing in different scandals, the same companies circling multiple tenders, the same political corridors offering convenient access, the same flows of unexplained money and the same “lucky” bidders winning at the same hospital.

When the same names, companies, and institutions keep appearing in crisis after crisis, you are not observing a coincidence. You are observing a network at work, which is coordinated, protected, and comfortably embedded within public institutions.

Matlala didn’t expose this network. He merely confirmed it existed. His testimony was a masterclass in the art of non-answers:

“I don't know”