THE HLOPHE JP IMPEACHMENT CASE

March 2025

The Justices of the Constitutional Court charged Western Cape High Court Division head Hlophe JP before the Judicial Service Commission ('JSC') with improperly trying to influence the decision of a case pending before it; and after his trial and conviction by a Tribunal of the JSC's Judicial Conduct Committee ('JCC'), a majority of JSC members recommended he be impeached.

The President removed Hlophe JP from the bench on 6 March 2024, following his suspension on 14 December 2022, and a majority vote of the National Assembly against him on 21 February 2024. Hlophe JP took his impeachment on review before the Constitutional Court, applying first for the recusal of most of its justices on various grounds; and in March 2024, the Constitutional Court recognised his case for recusal, and proceeded to ask everyone (via the Chief Justice writing), What the hell do we do now?

Hlophe JP recounts the history of the case in video and audio (also here) interviews conducted in Zulu.

Discussed below, Gauteng High Court Division head Mlambo JP is all over the case, and the implications are gargantuan.

Some key case documents:

• Hlophe JP's submissions after his trial by the JCC Tribunal, held over the period 7-11 December 2020

• The Tribunal's decision against him on 9 April 2021

• The JSC majority decision supporting the Tribunal's decision, undated, but delivered 26 August 2021

• The JSC minority decision rejecting the Tribunal's decision, 25 August 2021

• Hlophe JP's interdict and review application launched on 13 September 2021

The two diametrically contradictory JSC decisions are anonymous in that neither identifies their authors, even less do they reflect the split, i.e. which JSC members and how many voted for and agin.

But Brink has it from a conversation with a centrally placed person that Mlambo JP wrote the majority decision; and another centrally placed person confirmed this in a message to Brink, adding that the source of this information was ‘a senior member of the JSC’. Indeed, in his founding affidavit supporting his interdict and review application, Hlophe JP states in paragraph 49.5 that it was ‘widely reported’ that ‘the majority findings of the JSC … was written by [Mlambo JP].’ (Actually, it's very much more likely that they were ghost-written for him to present to the JSC as his own.)

If these hearsay reports are correct -- and even if there're wrong, and it was another, different member of the JSC (or other person) who authored the majority decision for the JSC's vote on it, with Mlambo JP merely joining the majority faction in recommending to the National Assembly that it vote to remove Hlophe JP from the bench -- it means that Mlambo JP recommended that Hlophe JP be impeached for gross misconduct while himself guilty of the gravest imaginable criminal and other impeachable misconduct on multiple counts, closely particularised and documented in Brink's eight gross misconduct complaints against him.

On 19 February 2024, following their comprehensive 42-page discussion of the evidence, the JSC appeal committee upheld Brink's appeal against the dismissal of his criminal and other capital complaints against Mlambo JP by JCC member Zondi JA, and recommended he be tried on Brink's charges before a Judicial Conduct Tribunal. How the JSC chaired by Zondo CJ responded, and further developments, you can read at corrupt-judges.co.za, where all documents in the case are posted.

Mlambo JP's criminal and other gross malfeasance detailed and substantiated in Brink's complaints obviously massively erodes the integrity of the decision, reportedly penned by Mlambo JP as a ranking member of the JSC and supported by the JSC majority, to uphold the JCC Tribunal's April 2021 report condemning Hlophe JP, and it equally undermines the reliability of this majority decision as a basis for the impeachment vote in Hlophe JP's matter by the National Assembly.

Brink's capital complaint against Waglay JP for throwing a case under improper influence -- the hard evidence of which he inadvertently but fortunately left behind in the court file, to be photocopied and inventoried for Brink by the court Registrar -- is currently on appeal (as at mid-March 2025).

Which only goes to show how crassly politicised and biased the JSC and its JCC is -- as illustrated also by the recent JSC interviews fiasco.

The papers in the Waglay JP judicial corruption case are posted here.

Presuming -- as appears from the several cogent indications canvassed in Brink's complaint against Waglay JP, and further in his invited comments on the latter's feeble response to the complaint -- that Mlambo JP wrote and passed to Waglay JP, which is to say forged and uttered, the poisonous, defamatory, lying 'memorandum' that perverted the latter's decision of Brink's petition for leave to appeal the dismissal of his labour action against LASA, chaired by Mlambo JP at the time, it follows that Mlambo JP condemned Hlophe JP for precisely the impeachable misconduct that he himself had committed in improperly, indeed criminally, influencing Waglay JP to throw out Brink's case.

As Brink shows in his complaint against Waglay JP, he obligingly tossed Brink's case on the turn, even before all the prescribed papers were in, pretending in his dismissal order that two other appeal judges, Davis and Sutherland JJA, had concurred in this, whereas in truth and in fact there's no trace in or on the file that they did so, and it's obviously inconceivable that these appeal judges could have taken a judicial decision like this without leaving any record of it. And these smart guys would certainly have found that the trial judge's misallocation of the final burden of proof was a radical reversible error, vitiating his decision to dismiss Brink's case, and a clear and basic ground of appeal eminently fit for argument. Among a shithouse full of other basic errors.

In short, it's highly probable -- since no one else at LASA had the power, the influence, the connections, the motive -- that Mlambo JP successfully committed the crime of defeating the ends of justice in importuning Waglay JP to find in LASA's favour (and practically in his own favour), of which attempted crime alleged by the Constitutional Court he judged Hlophe JP guilty.

Brink's PAIA request in September 2021 for access to certain specified JSC records (see items 32-7) will establish (a) the authors of the two opposing JSC decisions in the Hlophe JP case; (b) the identities of the other members of the majority and minority JSC factions who variously condemned and acquitted Hlophe JP; and (c) what the split was -- of likely interest to the National Assembly's members in considering and deciding whether or not to vote for Hlophe JP's removal, should his interdict and review application get bounced. Sued for, the JSC is withholding these records; the case is pending, and watch this space.

In paragraph 49.7 of his founding affidavit in that application, Hlophe JP states (rather clumsily):

It has come to my recent attention by an attorney Anthony Brink that a serious complaint was lodged against Judge President Mlambo. I do not have the full details of this complaint but I am reliably informed that the complaint is about his alleged involvement in lobbying to have Ms Noxolo Maduba assigned to be a member of the JCC. He is not the Chief Justice to have tried to influence the involvement of Ms Maduba in my complaint. The full extent of Judge President Mlambo’s involvement on this issue is not known to me, the JSC will provide full details thereof, but I believe it is appropriate that to the extent known to Judge President Mlambo, he should have disclosed his involvement in trying to influence the members that would form the panel against me.

A few points of correction: (1) Brink is an advocate not attorney; (2) he lodged not one but eight impeachable complaints against Mlambo JP; (3) none of these eight complaints made to the JCC in mid-2017 concerned Mlambo JP's grotesque abuse of power and influence as a judge to fix this certain young lady a job on the JCC Tribunal originally constituted in February 2013 to try the Constitutional Court’s complaint against Hlophe JP, right after she’d resigned her top post as a Regional Operations Executive on LASA's national management executive committee in December 2012 following an internal investigation of recruitment corruption in her region – as alleged to Brink by another former LASA Regional Operations Executive.

The investigation and her subsequent resignation were reported in the media at the time, and indeed Ms Maduba confirmed it in a public statement responding to it.

Brink's actual complaint concerning Ms Maduba was made to JSC secretary Chiloane in August 2020 and again to JSC member Zondo ACJ (then DCJ) in November 2020; and his complaint was that the JSC had illegally and unconstitutionally failed to respond to his PAIA request for records needed to support a further misconduct complaint against Mlambo JP regarding precisely this alleged grossly improper and inappropriate job-fixing for this particular woman, to Hlophe JP’s enormous potential prejudice, having regard, inter alia, to the just-mentioned circumstances of her resignation from LASA.

And from Brink's further sensitive information received from his erstwhile top-level inside informant about the interpersonal context in which Ms Maduba was appointed to the Tribunal (also her meteoric rise through LASA's ranks before she quit), and from Hlophe JP's paragraph 49 (see below), the extraordinary impropriety of Mlambo JP's involvement in her appointment, if he was indeed involved as alleged, looks very, very much worse.

During his telephone call to Brink on 14 November 2016, JSC secretary Chiloane told him that as he recalled it, Ms Maduba had resigned from the Tribunal 'to avoid an unseemly scandal'. Brink mentioned the affair in his letter to JSC chairperson Mogoeng CJ three years later in November 2019.

LASA (Chief Legal Executive Patrick Hundermark) is determinedly suppressing the charge-sheet drawn for Ms Maduba's disciplinary enquiry, before she resigned to avoid facing it -- according to Brink's above-mentioned informant; see item 30 of the list of requested records annexed to Brink's Form A PAIA request, annexure 'A' to his application to the Pietermaritzburg High Court to compel its discovery. Brink's litigation for access to the record and others is pending.

Brink is pursuing all JSC records relevant to Ms Maduba's appointment and resignation from the Tribunal; see items 38-47 of his his PAIA request in September 2021.

Besides the matter of Mlambo JP’s alleged grossly improper and hugely prejudicial involvement in Ms Maduba's appointment to the Tribunal for his own private reasons (as alleged by Brink's said informant), paragraph 49 of Hlophe JP's founding affidavit supporting his interdict and review application details Mlambo JP's repeatedly demonstrated prejudice against him on other occasions -- some of it characteristically surreptitious and later found out, like manoeuvring behind the scenes to get him kicked out the JSC, and then grabbing his vacated spot on it as senior judge president member. (The better to get his friends appointed as judges.)

See also the Zuma contempt case, in which Mlambo JP also features unpleasantly. As said at the end of that discussion, 'the head of the biggest and busiest High Court Division in South Africa, and aspirant next Chief Justice, should be in jail. Examine the evidence and judge for yourself.'

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