Ramaphosa was ‘a very good student’, Paul O’Sullivan tells ad hoc committee

Paul O’Sullivan testifies before Parliament’s ad hoc committee at the Good Hope Chamber in Cape Town on 10 February 2026. Picture: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach Fraud examiner Paul O’Sullivan says President Cyril Ramaphosa was his student in the 1990s while training as a police reservist, Parliament’s ad hoc committee heard. O’Sullivan appeared before the committee at the Good Hope Chamber in Cape Town on Tuesday.

The inquiry is probing alleged criminal infiltration and political interference in South Africa’s justice system. O’Sullivan explained that he joined the South African police in 1990, a year after moving from the UK. He took a role as a police reservist at Halfway House, now Midrand, where he trained as a detective and volunteered for a minimum of eight hours per week without pay.

He later worked at Booysens police station for five to six years before a serious on-duty shooting in 1996 left him with major spinal injuries. Thereafter, he was not involved in physical policing and worked in the fraud unit. It was during this period that Ramaphosa attended one of his courses in 1997.

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“Then he wasn’t even a politician. He was a businessman and he sat in on the training course that I was running,” O’Sullivan recalled, adding that Ramaphosa was “a very good student”.

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