On March 19 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa suspended with immediate effect the South African Revenue Service (Sars) commissioner Tom Moyane. In a letter to Moyane, Ramaphosa said: “Developments at Sars under your leadership have resulted in a deterioration in public confidence in the institution and in public finances being compromised. For the sake of the country and the economy, this situation cannot be allowed to continue, or to worsen.”
In May that year judge Robert Nugent was named to head a commission of inquiry into what happened at Sars under Moyane, who had been appointed by president Jacob Zuma in 2014. The Nugent commission issued an interim report four months later. This recommended, “after having afforded Mr Moyane an opportunity to make submissions on the issue, which he spurned, that on the evidence we had received thus far, he should be removed from office, without delay, and be replaced by a new commissioner of Sars”.
Given Ramaphosa’s usual approach in dealing with such issues, he moved with remarkable speed to sort out Sars. He had suspended Moyane only a month after he was appointed president in place of Zuma. Based on Nugent’s interim findings, Ramaphosa fired Moyane in November 2018. He could easily have argued that he should wait for the final report, which was issued only in December that year.
Ramaphosa appointed Edward Kieswetter as commissioner five months after dismissing Moyane — not an unreasonably long time, given the festive season break and the need to consider candidates of quality, and positively hasty by Ramaphosa’s standards.
This raises the question of why there has been slow action, if any, against those identified in other inquiries
This raises the question of why there has been slow action, if any, against those identified in other inquiries, notably the Zondo commission into state capture. It helped that Nugent worked so quickly in investigating Sars — but the point is that Ramaphosa’s action against Moyane showed that waiting for final reports is not essential if compelling evidence of wrongdoing emerges.
Nugent also pointed out that the processes of a commission of inquiry are different to those of a court of law. A commission, he wrote, “is a body conferred with authority to make inquiry, and then to report to the president what its inquiries have shown. Its process is proactively inquisitorial, in which the commission seeks out information for itself, unlike a court in adversarial litigation that is reactive to material others place before it.”
In short, while a commission’s recommendations are not binding, they can be acted on without waiting for endless legal proceedings. There are many serving politicians and civil servants implicated by Zondo who have not been dismissed or even suspended, by the president or the government departments concerned. Clearly the importance attached to Sars has not been seen in relation to other institutions.
Another lesson from the Moyane saga is that even where a state entity has been badly damaged, it can be fixed by appointing the right leader. Kieswetter has rightly been praised for his Sars repair job, as his tenure ended with the announcement of a record revenue haul of R2.01-trillion in the 2026 tax year.
But his success raises the question: how much could have been achieved in restoring the capacity of the state generally if the many people implicated by Zondo and other inquiries had not been left in place?
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