Molawa v. Matjhabeng Local Municipality

What happened

Molawa v. Matjhabeng Local Municipality arose from a long-delayed workplace disciplinary process. The three applicants and three other municipal employees were charged with misconduct in March 2021. After interlocutory disputes, including earlier review proceedings resolved by an agreed order in October 2024, the municipality took no further steps for more than a year. When the process resumed, the employees argued before the disciplinary chairperson that the municipality had waived its right to discipline them by missing the time periods in the bargaining council's disciplinary collective agreement.

The chairperson dismissed the waiver point in a written ruling and later refused to recuse himself. His ruling cited four authorities. The employees' case was that, apart from the first, they either did not exist or did not support the propositions attributed to them, and that they had been created with AI. At the end of June they filed a review application against both rulings, and when the hearing was re-enrolled for July 14 and 15, they applied urgently to stay it.

What the court did

Justice Allen-Yaman heard the urgent application on July 10 and handed down judgment on July 13. The court confirmed the employees' account of the citations:

• No Labour Appeal Court judgment exists under the citation Toyota SA Motors (Pty) Ltd v CCMA and Others 2016 ZALAC 28.
• No Labour Appeal Court judgment exists under the citation National Union of Metalworkers of SA obo Masinga and Others v Toyota SA Motors (Pty) Ltd [1992] 13 ILJ 104 (LAC).
• Natal Joint Municipal Pension Fund v Endumeni Municipality exists but did not deal with the interpretation of collective agreements.

The municipality's representative suggested the chairperson must have had other cases in mind. The court answered that this proposition "merely needs to be stated to be rejected." It did not find that AI produced the citations. In paragraph 33 it wrote that "the source of the erroneous citations has yet to be determined," and in paragraph 34 that "whether the citations were generated by an AI ‘assistant’ or self-generated by the Chairperson himself, the result is the same: there is prima facie evidence before this court that he failed to apply his mind to the law regarding both the issues of waiver and of recusal."

On that basis the court found exceptional circumstances justifying intervention in incomplete disciplinary proceedings. It noted that the chairperson had been given an opportunity to explain himself and had not done so. It stayed the hearing pending determination of the review under case number 2026-152359 and made no order as to costs, citing the continuing employment relationship and finding the opposition neither vexatious nor in bad faith.

Where it stands

The stay holds until the review is decided. The court also found that the chairperson had not been cited in the founding affidavit and so was not a party, which meant it could not order the alternative of replacing him. The outcome of the review was not located as of October 21, 2026.

In reaching its result the Molawa court drew on Ayinde v. Haringey and on the Indian Supreme Court's decision in Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank, recorded here as Pooja Ramesh Singh. It also sits with FJL v. TGO, another South African decision about an adjudicator's citations. Molawa differs in that the adjudicator was an internal disciplinary chairperson, and the remedy was to halt his process rather than to set aside a final decision.

The obligation it engaged

Clause 3 of the Standard, independent authority, is the clause the Molawa ruling engaged. The chairperson attributed principles to two Labour Appeal Court decisions that do not exist and a collective-agreement holding to a Supreme Court of Appeal decision that made none. Clause 4, checkability before adoption, follows: the citations were specific, and the employees tested them. Clause 7, contemporaneous record, bears on the chairperson's silence: asked for the authorities, he produced nothing, and the court treated that as part of the prima facie case.

The lesson for an expert witness is that the source of an error may never be resolved, and the court in Molawa did not need to resolve it. An expert asked to produce a cited authority should be able to do so at once. An expert who cannot will find, as the chairperson did, that how the error arose matters less than the fact that the analysis cannot be traced.

Sources

• Labour Court of South Africa (copy hosted for the AI Hallucination Cases database) · July 13, 2026
  Molawa and Others v Matjhabeng Local Municipality and Another, Case No. 2026-157576

What could not be confirmed

The judgment is internally inconsistent on dates: paragraph 11 says the chairperson's rulings were issued on 3 June 2025 and 21 June 2025, while paragraph 23 refers to his ruling of 3 June 2026 and paragraph 4 to his email of 21 June 2026; the entry avoids stating the year of the rulings. The heading names the Durban seat of the Labour Court. The chairperson is named in the caption but not here. Whether AI produced the citations was expressly left undetermined. The review outcome was not located as of 2026-10-21.