In a packed courtroom in April, the air was heavy with expectation. Then came the ruling: Timothy Omotoso — a charismatic televangelist accused of raping and trafficking women — walked free.
The judge’s rebuke was brutal, slamming prosecutors for shoddy cross-examination and dishonesty in handling the case. For the victims who braved eight gruelling years of delays, the acquittal felt like a betrayal — devastating. Some left feeling betrayed by a justice system that had promised to protect them.
This courtroom drama has reverberated far beyond one trial. It captures the public’s growing frustration with the NPA, an institution led by Shamila Batohi, tasked with mending the nation’s faith in justice amid a storm of criticism.
When Batohi was appointed head of the NPA in 2019, expectations were sky-high. The mandate was clear: end a culture of impunity that has flourished under her predecessors and bring the corrupt to book.
If Batohi’s task was daunting on paper, it has proven even tougher in practice. Over the past six years a series of high-profile prosecutorial setbacks has dominated headlines and tested the public’s patience. In case after case, alleged perpetrators of corruption and serious crime have escaped conviction, often not because they are innocent but because of prosecutorial mistakes or systemic delays. Each failure has further eroded confidence in the NPA and intensified calls for Batohi’s head.
This year has brought fresh disappointment. Last week, a Free State High Court judge dealt a blow to the long-running asbestos corruption case involving Ace Magashule.
The court found that the NPA’s attempt to extradite Magushule’s co-accused Moroadi Cholota from the US was unlawful — a glaring procedural bungle — and accordingly struck Cholota off the charge sheet. That mistake has imperilled the case, which was meant to hold Magashule and others accountable for a R255m fraud.
In the wake of these setbacks, it is hard to defend Batohi against a torrent of backlash. She hasn’t been silent, pushing back, and offering explanations, some might say excuses, for the NPA’s underwhelming performance on marquee cases. Her message: look deeper, the problems go beyond one person or institution.
To understand the NPA’s predicament, one must appreciate the entrenched challenges within the criminal justice system itself.
To begin with, a startling revelation came from Batohi herself. She claims the rot in the NPA is not fully expunged, suggesting that some prosecutors in her ranks are actively undermining cases. If true, it would certainly help to explain some of the mystifying mistakes that have occurred. Still, it is worth asking that, if double agents or moles lurk in the NPA, why after six years has Batohi not rooted out the saboteurs?
Beyond questions of loyalty, more mundane but no less serious constraints hamper the NPA. Budgetary and operational independence is one. The NPA does not fully control its purse strings, having to answer to the ministry of justice for resources. This arrangement can subject the prosecuting authority to bureaucracy and political whims. Due to limited funding in an era of globalised, sophisticated financial crime the NPA is outgunned.
And the NPA does not operate in a vacuum. It sits at the end of a long pipeline that begins with police investigations and continues through courts. If evidence gathered by police is weak or tainted, prosecutors struggle to secure convictions.
The truth is swapping out the person at the top will not magically fix the prosecutorial woes. The NPA’s struggles are symptomatic of deeper systemic flaws that need holistic solutions.
Even when the NPA succeeds in getting the accused in the dock, the wider justice system can frustrate final accountability. Our courts are clogged, and in other instances criminal suspects employ Stalingrad tactics to wear down the prosecution. The NPA rightly argues the delays are not of its making.
The wheels of justice turn slowly. But they have been almost stuck in the past 15 or so years, mired in the mud of corruption, incompetence and delay. The NPA must do better, to be sure, but so must the police and the courts that work alongside it.
Batohi’s tenure, for all its shortcomings, has at least resurrected the ideal that the law should be blind to status and ruthless towards wrongdoing.
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