As long as the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and the Hawks — the specialised unit tasked with investigating serious organised crime, commercial crime and corruption — remain underfunded, understaffed and poorly led, corruption will continue to flourish unchecked.
It’s now three years since former chief justice Raymond Zondo handed over the final volume of the state capture report to President Cyril Ramaphosa. The report named nearly 1,400 individuals and entities. Yet not one of the major players responsible for looting SA’s institutions sits in a jail cell. In fact, many of them occupy seats in the very parliament in which ActionSA serves.
From Scorpions to scapegoats
To fully grasp why this government is still dragging its feet on delivering justice for state capture — which cost the SA economy about R1-trillion, almost a third of this year’s national budget — we must go back to the moment Jacob Zuma came to power. At the ANC’s Polokwane conference in 2007 a decision was taken to disband the Scorpions, the country’s strongest anti-corruption unit with an unmatched conviction rate of about 90%. The unit was disbanded in 2008 after becoming a threat to Zuma and his allies, despite expert warnings and opposition party objections.
It was replaced by the Hawks in 2009, a police-controlled directorate stripped of the Scorpions’ independence and effectiveness. By 2015 police minister Nathi Nhleko was already conceding that the Hawks had become less effective, with a 60% drop in arrests since they took over.
The hollowing out of the Hawks mirrored the deliberate underfunding of the SA Revenue Service (Sars) under Tom Moyane — himself implicated in state capture — in 2018 as part of a broader effort to disable the institutions meant to fight organised and commercial crime. We are now living with the consequences of that project.
A justice system starved of capacity
The extent of the damage was made plain again recently when the Hawks and NPA briefed parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa). The Hawks disclosed that they are operating at just 50% of their approved staffing level, with 2,644 vacancies out of a total 5,332 posts. This shortfall forces them to triage cases and divert resources, and compromises the overall quality of investigations. They are also struggling to recruit and retain the critical skills needed to go after sophisticated criminal networks.
This crisis of capacity has a knock-on effect. As NPA head Shamila Batohi told the committee, the Hawks’ underfunding directly impairs the NPA’s ability to prosecute corruption cases. The Investigating Directorate Against Corruption — a special unit within the NPA — confirmed that only 94 cases have emerged from the state capture report to date, and only 37 had clear prosecution recommendations. The logic is simple: if the investigations collapse or never happen, there’s nothing to take to court. The entire criminal justice chain breaks down before it begins.
And yet nothing has changed under the ANC-led government of national unity. Despite this well-documented crisis, the 2025 budget allocates just R2.7bn to the Hawks, while spending R4.3bn on VIP protection services for a bloated cabinet of 75 ministers and deputies. Values are reflected in budgets, and this one tells us everything: the state will spend more protecting a handful of powerful jet-setters than protecting the country from serious organised crime and corruption. That isn’t just bad governance, it looks increasingly deliberate.
With organised crime and corruption escalating at an alarming rate — and with devastating consequences for economic growth, job creation, citizen safety and service delivery — it is nonsensical that the Hawks remain so poorly resourced. The only conclusion one can draw is that there is political benefit in their weakness. The underfunding of the Hawks is not merely a policy failure. It has all the signs of a political strategy to shield the corrupt from accountability while keeping the justice system disarmed.
The case for rebuilding accountability
There is clearly no political will to fight serious corruption. That’s the bottom line. And so it falls to us — those not captured by the system — to act. Just as ActionSA has advocated for the full resourcing of Sars, we will now do the same for the Hawks. We will present a business case to properly fund the institution, restore its investigative capacity and support a functional chain of justice.
We must also go further. SA needs a new elite anticorruption unit — a modern Scorpions — housed independently, shielded from political interference and empowered to investigate and prosecute grand corruption. Corruption is not just criminal. It is economic sabotage, and it must be treated as such.
We must also expand specialised crime units across the SA Police Service, capacitate the NPA with forensic and financial experts, and fast-track high-profile corruption cases through dedicated courts. Every day without these reforms is a day in which public money continues to disappear, and the corrupt remain untouched.
To rebuild trust in the rule of law we must properly fund and defend the institutions that hold the powerful to account. Corruption is eating away at the livelihoods of law-abiding South Africans. In this government the powerful are shielded, and the guilty walk free. That will only change when institutions such as the Hawks are properly funded.
• Beesley is an ActionSA MP and member of Scopa.
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