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When appointed National Director of Public Prosecutions this week, Shamila Batohi repeated several times in her acceptance speech that there was a lot of work to be done.
Selected partly because she’s been away from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for almost 10 years and is neither embroiled in nor beholden to any of the factions tearing the institution apart, Batohi knows of the vast task ahead.
The NPA, which has about as much credibility in the minds of South Africans as metro cops or local government officials, is a national embarrassment. Batohi’s job is to fix it.
And it’s not just the factions that need addressing. Last week’s humiliating withdrawal of charges against the Gupta lieutenants accused in the Estina dairy farm case – in which R250 million of state money was syphoned out of the country by the looting elite – is just one example.
The court loss earlier this year by the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU), which forced it to unfreeze the Guptas’ assets, is another.
Batohi is going to have to beef up capacity urgently at both the Specialised Commercial Crimes Unit and the AFU if we are going to see any justice in the state capture saga because the NPA has neither the expertise nor the staff to take on state capturers who can pay top-notch private lawyers from wells of looted funds.
Its standards also need to be raised, fast.
On her to-do list is improving the NPA’s relationship with the Special Investigating Unit, which has been referring criminal corruption cases about which precious little is being done.
She will have to kick butt at the Hawks to raise the standards of its investigations to ensure convictions.
At the moment, the court of public opinion is the only one in which some measure of justice is dispensed in this country.
Batohi will have to see to it that the bad guys see real justice.
