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Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police met this week to question the South African Police Service, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, and the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, commonly known as the Hawks, about the handling of the theft of foreign currency hidden in a couch at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Limpopo farm.

MPs wanted to know why the police did not secure the couch in which the money was hidden, whether it was photographed, whether it was booked in as evidence, and what happened to it after the theft.

ActionSA MP Dereleen James put the question directly. “Was this couch actually booked in as part of evidence?” she asked. She said there were no pictures and asked whether the crime scene had been properly cordoned off. “Where is the evidence [of] this couch that everyone is speaking about?” she asked.

An investigative report into the matter, published in November 2022, recorded that the stolen foreign currency “had been hidden in a sofa in the private residence of the president”.

That report recorded that on 9 February 2020, an undisclosed amount of foreign currency, which had been hidden in a couch in the private residence of the president, was stolen. It also recorded that no case was opened or registered at the police station in Bela-Bela after the housebreaking and theft.

The report dealt at length with how the money came to be in the sofa. Ramaphosa’s version was that lodge manager Sylvester Ndlovu had received $580 000 in cash from a Sudanese businessman Mustafa Mohamed Ibrahim Hazim to purchase buffalo. The money was reportedly first placed in a safe, but Ndlovu later allegedly moved it into a sofa in the president’s private residence because several staff members had access to the safe.

The report was not satisfied that the explanation resolved the matter. It said the president’s version on the storage of the money was “vague and leaves unsettling gaps”. It asked whether the money was below the cushions or inside the sofa. It also noted that if $580 000 in cash had been stored below the cushions, it would have been visible to anyone passing by.

The Common Sense has done the maths on the reported $580 000. If that sum were paid entirely in $100 notes, it would amount to 5 800 bills. Stacked together, those notes would form a compact block roughly 15.6cm long, 6.6cm wide, and just over 63cm high, with a total volume of about 6.5 litres. In other words, this was not a few loose notes slipped between cushions, but a sizeable bundle of cash large enough to give real physical meaning to the claim that money was concealed in a couch. The image below gives a sense of what that volume would look like next to an ordinary leather couch.

The report concluded, as a matter of probability, that the money was “concealed inside a leather sofa”. It also found that, in all probability, the money was stored in the couch with the “full knowledge and approval of the president”.

That made the Parliamentary committee’s question unavoidable. If the money was concealed inside the couch, then the couch was not merely furniture. It was the object that allegedly held the cash, and therefore an important part of the evidentiary chain.

The Hawks did not tell MPs where the couch was or what happened to it. They said the crime allegedly occurred in 2020, but that the case was only reported to police in 2022. They said investigators later visited the crime scene, but “the couch which is inquired of was not found at the premises”.

James pressed the point again later in the meeting. The money, she said, was allegedly stashed in the couch, which made it part of the evidence. She asked again where the couch was and how the case could have a proper outcome if such evidence had not been booked in.

The police answer did not satisfy MPs. When asked again about the couch, the Hawks said the crime under investigation was housebreaking and theft, “not the theft of the sofa”. They said the actual exhibit for investigators to focus on was the cash.

uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK) MP Thulani Shongwe rejected that explanation. He said that if a house was broken into and someone was stabbed on a couch, “that sofa forms part of evidence”. His point was that the couch’s relevance came from what allegedly happened in or around it, not from whether the couch itself had been stolen.

David Mandla Skosana, also of MK, pressed a related question. He asked where the couch was, whether the leftover money had been counted and confiscated as evidence, and why not, if it had not been.

The question of the money deepened the evidentiary problem. Skosana asked whether the reported $580 000 had actually been counted, saying the committee did not want to be “gossiping” about whether the amount was $580 000, $650 000, or $1 million. The Hawks said police were “not involved during the counting of the money” and relied on the farm manager’s evidence and receipt documents.

The investigative report had already flagged the same uncertainty. It said the exact amount stolen had not been made known, and noted information suggesting more than $580 000 may have been concealed in the couch. The report also found that there was “substantial doubt” about whether the foreign currency came from the proceeds of the buffalo sale.

The couch question therefore now links two inquiries separated by more than three years. In 2022, the investigative report said the money was probably concealed inside a leather couch. In 2026, MPs asked police where that couch was. The Hawks said it was not found at the premises.