Finally, the faces of some of the alleged leaders of the ‘Big Five’ cartel have been revealed after months of testimony at the Madlanga Commission.
For months the Madlanga Commission had circled a name without a face, the “Big Five”, a syndicate spoken of in whispers, WhatsApp logs and reluctant testimony from senior police officers who seemed more afraid of the cartel than of the commission itself.
That changed on 2 September 2026, when the inquiry finally put faces to the name, tabling a photograph that identified five men allegedly at the centre of an alleged criminal network accused of reaching into South Africa’s police service, its courts and its politics. While the five are not necessarily the “Big Five”, which is emerging as a loose description for a broad organised crime network, they’re alleged to be key cartel leaders.
The image, shown during the testimony of former Hawks head Lieutenant-General Godfrey Lebeya, named Katiso “KT” Molefe, Steve Motsumi, Ignatius Mothakathi, Andrew “Boy” Mthethwa, also known as King Nyambose, and the late Jothan “Mswazi” Msibi. All five have featured repeatedly in evidence before the commission, though none has been convicted of the crimes alleged against them, and the commission itself has stressed that its findings are not judicial verdicts of guilt.
Molefe is, by most accounts, the most legally exposed of the group. He is currently facing trial on more than 30 charges, among them the killing of Armand Swart, an engineer whose death has been linked in testimony to a disputed Transnet tender.
Molefe has been described before the commission as a businessman with a violent parallel life, and his name has surfaced again and again in evidence about contract killings and attempts to manipulate state procurement processes.
Investigators have also placed Molefe at the centre of a scheme, alongside Msibi and Motsumi, to acquire covert surveillance equipment, so-called “grabber” technology capable of intercepting cellphone communications, from a company in the Czech Republic, ostensibly on behalf of the South African Police Service (SAPS) but allegedly intended for resale to the Kingdom of Eswatini.
Steve Motsumi is a Johannesburg businessman with interests spanning construction, money lending and the taxi industry, and until recently he lived a carefully guarded, low-profile existence in the northern suburbs.
That changed as his name kept surfacing in commission testimony. Witness after witness, including senior police officers, described him as someone they were reluctant to name in open session for fear of the consequences.
Motsumi has been linked to leaks of confidential police information and, like Molefe, to the alleged plan to bring interception technology into the country under false pretences. Even the former head of the Hawks in one province, according to evidence led before the commission, admitted he had been too afraid to say Motsumi’s name aloud during his testimony.
Ignatius “Pheello” Mothakathi has emerged as one of the connective figures in the network, someone alleged to move between the cartel’s core and the police officers who allegedly served its interests. Evidence before the commission traced a pattern of calls between Mothakathi, an SAPS sergeant named Fannie Nkosi, and members of Msibi’s network around the time hitmen linked to the Molefe murder case were arrested, with Mothakathi allegedly acting as a go-between who could reach the cartel’s inner circle when investigators or associates needed information to be moved quickly.
Andrew “Boy” Mthethwa, known within the network as King Nyambose, was the figure Lebeya claimed under oath not to know, a denial the commission’s evidence leaders did not accept easily. A WhatsApp message read into the record, sent from a socialite identified as Malcolm X to Lebeya’s own phone in December 2024, thanked the former Hawks boss for sending officers to verify the identities of men at Molefe’s house, and noted that “King Nyambose” appreciated the effort.
Commissioner Sesi Baloyi pressed Lebeya on why, if Mthethwa’s network could reach the head of the Hawks directly, that intelligence never made its way into any formal Hawks investigation, a failure Baloyi called a “serious institutional lapse”.
Jothan “Mswazi” Msibi, a Pretoria taxi boss who died in 2024, has been described in testimony as the cartel’s former leader, its so-called president, and the figure around whom much of the network is alleged to have organised.
His brother served as treasurer of the ANC in Mpumalanga, a detail that has fed suspicion about the syndicate’s reach into party structures as well as the state. Msibi’s phone, recovered after his death, has become one of the commission’s most significant sources of evidence, yielding message threads that investigators say expose the Eswatini surveillance-equipment plan in granular detail, down to a planned technical demonstration involving an outside phone expert.
Beyond the five men named in the photograph, the commission’s evidence keeps widening the circle. Crime Intelligence boss Dumisani Khumalo first introduced the Big Five publicly in testimony given in late September 2025, describing a Gauteng-based syndicate involved in drug trafficking, hijackings, tender fraud and contract killing, with tendrils reaching into politics, business and law enforcement.
Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, a tenderpreneur already facing his own criminal charges, has repeatedly been described as a leader within or closely tied to the network, and his security company has been linked to an allegedly unlawful R360-million arrangement with a metro police department to supply surveillance technology and tactical equipment.
Other names, Joseph “Ferrari” Sibanyoni, businessman Ze Nxumalo, and former Ekurhuleni city manager Imogen Mashazi, have surfaced in connection with tender manipulation traced back to Msibi.
What ties the five named men together, in the commission’s evidence, is not simply shared criminality but a demonstrated ability to move senior state officials on command. Lebeya’s own testimony, in which he insisted he was “incorruptible” even as he conceded sending Hawks personnel in response to a request traced back to the cartel, became a case study in exactly the kind of informal reach the commission was established to investigate.
Whether that reach extended into deliberate obstruction of justice, or was simply poor judgement by an official who misread who he was dealing with, is precisely the question Justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga’s panel is trying to resolve.
For now, the photograph itself has become a kind of milestone in the inquiry, the moment abstract testimony about an underworld network turned into five identifiable faces, one of them already dead, the rest still very much part of the story the commission is trying to finish telling.
None of the allegations against the living four have yet been tested in a court of law, and the commission has been careful to frame its evidence as testimony and documentary material placed on the public record, rather than as proven fact.
But for a country that has spent more than a year watching senior police officers describe fear, evasion and institutional failure in the same breath as the words “Big Five”, seeing the faces attached to those words landed as confirmation of something many had already suspected – that organised crime in Gauteng has not simply operated alongside the state, but through it. DM
Thando Nzimande is a Wits alumnus, a Future Voices scholar and researcher at Meari, a neuroscience researcher and economic and geopolitical commentator/analyst.
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