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NDPP Shamila Batohi at a meeting of the Portfolio Committee on Justice in March 2020.
- Recent state prosecutions related to the seizure are just a small particle in a huge iceberg, said the head of national prosecutions, Shamila Batohi.
- He said the prosecutions show the wheels of justice are turning.
- However, a proposed budget cut could halt the progress made.
The era of impunity is over and the wheels of justice are turning, but they may be stopped if the budget of the National Fiscal Authority (NPA) is cut, NPA chief Shamila Batohi told the Justice Portfolio Committee on Wednesday and Penitentiary Services.
He added that the corruption-related prosecutions that the NPA recently filed were just a “tiny, tiny dot on a huge iceberg.”
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Batohi presented the NPA’s annual report for 2019-2020 and a report on the first quarter of 2020 to the committee on Wednesday morning.
“The wheels of justice are turning. It has been slow,” he said.
“In the past, these cases may have never seen the inside of a courtroom,” he said, adding that things have changed at the NPA.
When he joined the organization, he found that he lacked resources in terms of skills, capacity and funding, that the organization had lost credibility and that staff morale was at an all-time low, he said.
Convictions
It was clear that change was required to rebuild an independent, professional, responsible and credible PAN. And over the past year, a lot of effort has gone into this, he said.
The first step was to reach out to senior management and appoint new, committed, and high-integrity people.
The second step was to listen to the staff and understand their concerns.
The NPA also managed to run the largest recruitment drive in its history, thanks to an additional budget allocation.
Public Prosecutor’s Deputy Director Rodney de Kock said 183 government officials were convicted of corruption during the 2019-20 financial year.
However, the budget cut proposed by the National Treasury in the wake of the economic devastation of Covid-19 could cause the NPA to lose 585 prosecutors.
Batohi said the proposed budget cuts in the Medium Term Spending Framework (MTEF) would undo the progress made by the NPA and “undermine the president’s commitment to rebuild the NPA.”
“The fight against corruption is a priority for the NPA and needs a lot of investment and commitment from the government,” he added.
The NPA has formally written to the National Treasury, which indicated that it would consider the NPA’s concerns.
“We must be very careful that the NPA does not lose any of the money it has received,” Batohi said.
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