MLAMBO JP'S INTERVIEW FOR THE CHIEF JUSTICE POST IN FEBRUARY 2022

Brink's objection to Mlambo JP as a manifestly unsuitable candidate for appointment as next Chief Justice, being an unconvicted criminal, was delivered to the JSC on 15 October 2021, published in full by Africa News Global online on the 20th, and reported by the Daily News as its front-page headline article on the 21st and by IOL online. The public interest law firm Limpopo Legal Solutions also objected to Mlambo JP on account of his obstruction of a criminal investigation of an allegedly corrupt judge who'd served in his Division, and News24 reported this on the 20th.

Concerning Mlambo JP's personal and professional integrity, i.e. complete lack of any, see the contextual notes beneath the record specifications in Part Two of this PAIA request for JSC records, made in September 2021. An application to the High Court to compel compliance with the request that the JSC ignored elicited a partial response to it, in that the JSC belatedly complied with Part One, but it's resisting responding to Part Two, the awkward bit. The case is pending.

Disregarding both objections, as well as the still pending criminal and other gross misconduct charges Brink had filed against him, the JSC proceeded to interview Mlambo JP for the Chief Justice post in February 2022, but Zondo DCJ (as he then was) got appointed by the President instead, even as the JSC found him to be the least suitable of the four interviewed candidates for the top job, and ranked him last of the four applicants they interviewed.

Although the JSC selected and recommended Supreme Court of Appeal head Mandisa Maya P for appointment to the Chief Justice post vacated by Mogoeng Mogoeng CJ, President Ramaphosa explained his preference for Zondo DCJ in risibly hollow cant: 'I considered the great value in ensuring continuity and certainty in the leadership of the judiciary, and the important role the judiciary plays in ensuring trust and faith in state institutions.' (In October 2023, the Jacob Zuma Foundation challenged the legality of the appointment on judicial review.) Zondo CJ retired at the end of July 2024, and Maya DCJ succeeded him as new Chief Justice in August.

During his interview, Mlambo JP told the JSC that long after he'd been appointed as a judge, he enrolled to study for an LLB degree and was irritated by the consistently bum marks his professors and tutors gave him, including and especially in Labour Law, in which subject he imagined himself to be a seasoned expert, being head of the Labour- and Labour Appeal Courts at the time. Consistent with his legal professional ineptitude repeatedly found by his academic examiners, Mlambo JP was challenged at his interview with rumours that his judgments were ghostwritten for him.

Besides being a legal dullard on his own version with hardly enough brains to run the till at his local KFC, and a stranger to the truth as the records show, Mlambo JP equally despises the rule of law as the records also show. Small surprise then that a prominent Black senior counsel considers him to be a jumped-up affirmative action disaster, a 'legal wrecking ball' and 'a thug'. Who delivers risibly contradictory, unprincipled, inconsistent judgments to ride the political thermals for personal advantage.

Consistently with this, after his successful interview for the Deputy Chief Justice post in July 2025 Legalbrief reported: 'Asked about Mlambo’s interview, Judges Matter’s Mbekezeli Benjamin [noted that] he stumbled a bit on broader theoretical questions of his judicial philosophy'. Small surprise.

A casual liar too, as said. The journalist who wrote the Daily News article reporting the objections to Mlambo JP's application for the Chief Justice post informed Brink that when she called him on his cellphone to get his comment before going to print – using the number that Brink had just sourced for her at her request from a legal colleague, because she couldn't reach him via his court's landline – the lying judge tried shaking her off after she introduced herself by falsely denying that it was him on the other end and by claiming that she'd got the wrong number. When she reported this to Brink, he reverted to his source who confirmed that the number was correct, as vouched by the Truecaller app. The journalist then called the lying judge again on the same confirmed number, and he told her the same lie again. When she reported this to Brink, he verified the number again, now with with a different legal colleague who said he'd used it in text message exchanges with the judge. The journalist now called the same number for a third time (from a different phone?), and this time Mlambo JP didn't falsely dispute that she'd reached him and that it was him talking to her, and said he'd given the JSC his responses to the two objections and had no further comment to make. In reporting this to Brink, the journalist expressed her shock and disgust, and indeed sounded exceedingly agitated, that a top judge could have lied to her so blatantly and shamelessly in evading her initial calls. Question is: Why would the lying judge have repeatedly lied like this?

Raised by four different JSC commissioners at his interview for the Chief Justice post, Mlambo JP's personal and professional integrity in relation to the ladies came up repeatedly. The Pretoria Bar afterwards demanded that Dali Mpofu SC be kicked off the JSC for his questions about this, as did the General Council of the Bar ('GCB'). Aching to be appointed by Mlambo JP as an acting judge of his court, in his hope to land a permanent job on the bench one day, GCB chairman Craig Watt-Pringle SC condemned him too, and implied that Mlambo JP couldn't possibly have abused his high office for intimate personal advantage. The GCB, Watt-Pringle SC said, had nominated Mpofu SC for membership of the JSC 'on the basis that he represents the profession not on the basis that he would behave in this way towards highly respected judges'. In other words, according to the leader of the South African Bar sucking up to the 'respected judge', an advocate ipso facto professionally misconducts himself by accusing a judge like Mlambo JP of moral turpitude, irrespective of the evidence – which, as noted in the paragraph above, the JSC is suppressing.

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Former SSA DG Fraser's objection to Zondo DCJ as a candidate for appointment as next Chief Justice was reported by News24 on 19 October 2021, and Zondo DCJ's answer to it was reported two days later. Fraser has now gone to court over Zondi DCJ's findings made against him without affording him a hearing. Not that it would have made any difference; on his own showing, the country's then-top judge condemns people without properly considering their detailed evidence, merely skimming over its 'theme[s]' instead.)

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