NPA must expediate State capture prosecutions
25 August 2021
The DA calls on the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Adv Shamila Batohi, and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to demonstrate to South Africans that the evidence on State capture presented before the Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture will be taken seriously and prosecuted as a matter of urgency. To date, we have seen very little in the way of real action.
The prosecution of the former Minister of Social Development, Bathabile Dlamini, for perjury after she gave false evidence during a 2018 inquiry into her role in the social grant crisis of 2016, has shown that there is an appetite to pursue these high-level cases and the NPA must not allow this opportunity to pass. It is imperative that high-level prosecutions are undertaken soon, to show that everyone is equal before the law.
The NPA must use all the tools at their disposal – the NPA Investigating Directorate established in 2019 by President Cyril Ramaphosa and the protocol regarding the sharing of information and evidence between the Directorate and the Commission that safeguards the permissibility of this evidence before a court that was established and signed in August 2020 – to prosecute all individuals implicated in corruption at the Zondo Commission.
Earlier this year the DA submitted parliamentary questions to the NPA with regards to their Investigating Directorate as there has been no updates nor any prosecutions of note to show that the State is serious about prosecuting and pursuing the allegations before the Zondo Commission.
Serious allegations have been made against powerful individuals and has shaped South Africa’s economic reality into a country whose unemployment rate is five times that of the world average. Transnet, Eskom, Denel, and the State Security Agency (SSA) were some of the piggybanks that were regularly abused.
Without any thought or compassion for the country’s increasingly poor and vulnerable masses, South Africa was allowed to be looted and destroyed to enrich greedy cadres deployed by the ANC to siphon billions of Rands from taxpayers and into the pockets of the politically connected, like the Gupta family – whose extradition proceedings do not appear to be making any real progress.
Not only has this resulted in zero service delivery and failing infrastructure in towns and cities across the country, as a result, unemployment has soared while investment has plummeted. And then President Ramaphosa has the audacity to defend the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment and the cadre deployment committee that he headed for 5 years.
State capture has infected all manner of institutions and flourished for the better part of a decade – the only thing that has flourished under the ANC government.
The NPA needs to demonstrate that it is both willing and able to prosecute these perpetrators, whose identity is by now common knowledge, and play their not inconsiderable part in rooting out corruption.
Issued by Glynnis Breytenbach, DA Shadow Minister of Justice and Correctional Services, 25 August 2021
