Smith rose to political prominence as deputy chairperson of the ANC's large regional branch in Johannesburg, an office he held from 1995 to 2004.
[2][4] The Mail & Guardian said that he was reputed to be "at the forefront" of the ANC's assault on local politician Trevor Ngwane, who was suspended from the party in 1999 for criticising a plan to privatise municipal assets.
[4] He was compared variously to a torpedo; to "a smaller version of presidential spin-doctor Essop Pahad"; and to the Wolf, the fixer of murder scenes in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
[4][6] After the 2004 general election, at the outset of Smith's second term in the National Assembly, the ANC nominated him to chair SCOPA, in an unprecedented deviation from the tradition of granting the position to an opposition party.
The Mail & Guardian published a series of exposés implicating senior officials, including former prisons commissioner Linda Mti,[10][11] and in March 2011, City Press obtained a leaked copy of the report of an investigation by Willie Hofmeyr's Special Investigating Unit (SIU), which had uncovered extensive prima facie evidence of corruption in the Bosasa contracts.
[13][14] As the Mail & Guardian later observed, the committee did not mention the corruption allegations in its final report to Parliament at the end of the parliamentary term in 2014.
[20] Though the allegations pertained to Smith's tenure as chairperson of the correctional services committee, Mthembu suggested that they had been orchestrated by forces opposed to land expropriation without compensation.
[20] He told the media: Whilst we do not understand the motive behind those who put this story in the public domain‚ we can only suspect that their timing is inspired by the ANC's position on the expropriation of land without compensation.
We are therefore convinced that he is a target of the organisations who are vehemently opposed to our people getting access to the land that they were dispossessed from by colonial and apartheid oppressors.
In January 2019, during his testimony to the Zondo Commission, he denied Smith's account of the Bosasa payments, saying that the money was neither loaned to Smith nor paid by Agrizzi in his personal capacity; instead, the payments were part of a deliberate scheme by Bosasa to co-opt members of the correctional services committee and thereby "manage the negative impact" of media reports about corruption.
[24] According to Agrizzi, Bosasa executive Gavin Watson had paid monthly cash payments to Smith and two other ANC MPs on the committee, Vincent Magagula and Winnie Ngwenya.
[25]Part three of the Zondo Commission's final report, released in March 2022, focused on Bosasa and largely accepted the allegations of misconduct by Smith.
[26] The report concluded that Smith had breached the "oath sworn by Members of Parliament to uphold the Constitution and to perform their work to the best of their ability".
[27] The National Prosecuting Authority alleged that he had accepted unlawful inducements in exchange for endorsing the extension of Bosasa's contract with the government; Agrizzi also faced criminal charges for having bribed him.
[27] In November 2021, the Investigating Directorate amended the indictment to add charges of tax fraud and money laundering, pertaining to income of about R28 million that Euroblitz 48 had allegedly failed to disclose to South African Revenue Service between 2009 and 2018.