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ActionSA’s fight against IPID’s decision to classify their Phala Phala report has finally been won, with the Minister announcing the declassification of the report, 

The decision to classify the report effectively denied South Africans the right to know what transpired with members of the Presidential Protection Unit mishandling the investigation into the robbery at the President’s farm. Our efforts to obtain this report through a PAIA application experienced bizarre delays, including requests for extensions, downed email systems and the rejection of our first PAIA application.

With the declassification of the report, ActionSA’s appeal will no longer need to be upheld and the report can be provided. ActionSA has issued papers to IPID today to ensure this happens immediately.

Astonishingly, after a year of ActionSA’s fight, the Acting Police Minister, in response to a parliamentary question, revealed that the report had been declassified as of 2 February 2026. That this was not communicated to South Africans, who remain as much in the dark as they were two years ago, only fuels the growing belief that this GNU promises transparency but has no intention of delivering it.

The Acting Minister has also stated that the report is not to be released, as it is not IPID procedure, and that any legally obtained version of the report is likely to be heavily redacted. One can only wonder how much valuable information will be concealed under the mountain of inevitable redactions. The victory of obtaining this report, however, will allow ActionSA and civil society to challenge both the redactions and the report itself in court if these concerns are realised.

Every element of the Phala Phala scandal has been whitewashed and sanitised to protect President Ramaphosa from accountability for having $580 000 stored in his furniture. Every government institution has acted to protect the President, and once-vocal opposition parties have abandoned this fight now that they occupy seats on the GNU and are too busy flying around the world in luxury to speak for South Africans. 

This is why ActionSA’s fight, and our victory, matters. ActionSA was already in the process of preparing legal papers to declassify the IPID report. Legal means will be considered again if IPID does not provide the full transparency South Africans have been demanding.

South Africans are increasingly seeing this GNU government as a failure against their expectations that it will deliver meaningful change in their lives. The fact that ActionSA has had to fight this matter for more than a year shows that this GNU government has continued where its predecessors left off, protecting their own interests over those of the country. 

In the coming days, when ActionSA receives the report, we will share its contents and communicate our next steps.

Issued by ActionSA National Chairperson Michael Beaumont