WhatTheySaid.co.za makes the public record of the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry into corruption in the South African Police Service (SAPS) legible to ordinary South Africans. The commission has sat for 130+ days. Almost nobody has read the transcripts.
The site is published by Datastroom IT (Pty) Ltd in the public interest. It is independent — not affiliated with or endorsed by the Madlanga Commission, the SAPS, or any government body.
The site reports what was testified and documented. It does not assert guilt, innocence, or character. It does not produce a truthfulness score or a clean bill of health. A claim stated once and never challenged passes through this system unseen, even if false. These limits are deliberate and are stated plainly throughout the site.
- Commission transcripts are broken into atomic claims — one fact per entry, each tagged with the witness, hearing day, and source sentence.
- A contradiction is detected when the same person or two different witnesses make conflicting assertions about the same fact. Detection is either deterministic (lookup, un-fabricatable) or AI-assisted (cited, hedged).
- Certain contradictions are found by exact lookup — no model can invent them. Likely contradictions are found by an AI reading the record, and are always cited back to the source testimony.
- The Ask tool retrieves relevant claims from the record and asks an AI to summarise them. It answers only from what was retrieved — not from general knowledge.
- Every page links back to the hearing day and witness it draws from. If there is no citation, there is no claim.
Datastroom IT (Pty) Ltd processes the names and public roles of individuals who appeared before or were named in the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry. This information is drawn exclusively from the Commission's published transcripts. Processing is conducted for journalistic and public accountability purposes under Section 7 of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).
We do not process home addresses, personal contact details, or financial account information of private individuals. Commission-pseudonymised witnesses are not identified on this site.
Questions submitted via the Ask tool are logged with your IP address for security monitoring. Logs are retained for 90 days and are not shared with third parties.
To request a correction or raise a privacy concern, contact privacy@datastroom.co.za. Information Officer: Datastroom IT (Pty) Ltd, registered in South Africa.