LISTEN | 'We did not fail': NPA speaks out on high-profile state capture cases

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) says it has not failed to successfully prosecute state capture crimes. 

This was revealed during the NPA media round-table with national director of public prosecutions Shamila Batohi and the NPA's executive team on Wednesday. 

Andrea Johnson, head of the NPA’s Investigating Directorate (ID), said her unit did not fail as the Nulane matter was on appeal and Matshela Koko's corruption case was struck off the court roll. 

“When you go to court, you go to court as an officer of the court respecting the rule of law and expecting everything to go in terms of fairness and objectivity. That didn't turn out to be exactly the case in the Koko matter.

“Unbeknown to us, we must do what we must do — always go in good faith, building the case that we have. We did enrol on a prima facie case. We did not fail on the Koko matter, the matter will be enrolled (again),” she said. 

Johnson added the issue about the magistrate in the Koko case was sensitive but also worrying. It was reported that the presiding officer on the case allegedly failed to declare his own business interests in Eskom. 

“We are able to say that steps will be taken in terms of the relevant reporting lines. The outcome thereof cannot be dictated to by the NPA, but we will make sure that the matter is escalated to where it needs to be,” she said.    

Batohi said Koko's case related to certain aspects of procurement and getting the necessary capacities, and the NPA needed to analyse lots of data.

She said the magistrate could have made one of the several orders but took the most drastic order to strike the case off the court's roll. 

“We must ask why. Again I want to be very careful as the prosecuting authority, we don’t openly criticise. We are officers of the court and we have to respect the judgments, but in this specific case [it] is a fact that various orders could have been made. The most drastic one was made,” Batohi said. 

She added they looked at what they could have done better to ensure they were able to get that expertise they were trying to procure externally to fast-track the matter.

Batohi said with the Nulane matter, the NPA looked at what it could have done, and at the lessons learnt. 

“We, more than anyone, know the risks to the NPA. We cannot just say 'we did everything fine, there is nothing [else] we could have done' and blame everybody else.

“We have to have very hard and difficult conversations with ourselves to make sure that we learn from what went wrong and that we make sure we put in place interventions to make sure that the risks of that happening again are minimised,” Batohi said. 

Batohi said the NPA has hundreds of excellent and dedicated prosecutors who have served their country with distinction.

“Yet a decade of state capture severely hampered NPA’s growth trajectory — significant energy [was] devoted to rebuilding a fit-for-purpose NPA, future-proofing it to increase public confidence in the NPA. We needed to do this while the public cry for orange overalls had understandably become deafening,” she said. 

She said the NPA has made significant progress and has been guided by a bold five-year strategy that laid the foundation and provided the guidance for all their strategic interventions.

Batohi said over the past five years the NPA had stabilised its senior leadership at headquarters and regions and increased staff capacity and capabilities to keep up with the changing nature of crime. 

It has also partnered civil society and the private sector to secure specialised skills, and collaborated with international experts to incorporate comparative best practices into its operations. 

“Significant progress has been made to build a strong institution which is critical for a democratic society and rule of law — not all visible and also not the type of accomplishment that the media is interested in covering — good news doesn’t often sell. And the drudgery of institution-building is not always that interesting,” she said. 

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