NPA head Shamila Batohi did not mince words when describing the dysfunction of the state prosecuting organ she was chosen by the president to lead four months ago.

“It is much worse than I expected,” Batohi said candidly.

Delivering the keynote address at the Daily Maverick Business Against Corruption event in Johannesburg on 27 June 2019, Batohi laid out the scale of the NPA’s challenges.

After 10 years of working abroad, Batohi returned to South Africa to find an NPA divided and weakened by causes including both instability and impropriety in leadership, the exodus of skilled staff, a lack of training and development programmes for staff, and a moratorium on hiring new staff which has brought the NPA to the verge of “collapse” in some areas.

“The NPA is a house on fire,” Batohi summarised, before joking that when she became aware that the event was being broadcast live, “I should have deleted that [line]”.

But while Batohi gets to grips with her new position, the South African public is increasingly anxious for news of criminal consequences for the architects of State Capture.

IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi summed it up in the post-SONA debate this week when he asked President Cyril Ramaphosa: “Where are the arrests?”

Batohi says she is acutely aware that South Africans are “rightly hungry for justice; real, tangible justice where they see the corrupt persons go to jail”. She has also noted the calls in the media for imminent arrests.

But Batohi won’t be pressured into any premature moves.

“Not the NPA nor the Investigative Directorate will be leveraged into hasty actions,” she announced. “Our focus is not on chasing statistics.”

The Investigative Directorate (ID) is a new NPA unit announced in late May 2019, to be led by advocate Hermione Cronje. Its specific focus, Batohi said, will be on investigating “serious, complex, high-profile corruption”, with a particular emphasis on cases emanating from the various commissions of inquiry taking place over the past 18 months.

Cronje’s unit will have advantages over the regular NPA processes: It brings together prosecutors, investigators and analysts with the ability to engage experts from the private sector too. But Batohi stressed that the ID will not be responsible for all investigations and neither will it be “a panacea for all corruption”.

The Hawks still need to investigate many corruption cases; the capacity of the NPA’s commercial crimes unit needs to be rebuilt; and the asset forfeiture unit must be fortified in addition.

“It is really important that we do not only hold people accountable, but also bring back the money,” Batohi said.

Keen to reassure the public that her first months in office have not been idle, Batohi listed some of the progress made to date.

The establishment of the ID has been a major focus, but Batohi said she has also begun a process of “restructuring and decentralisation” of the wider NPA.

The NPA head has been engaged in a provincial listening tour to hear the concerns and views of NPA staff. There has also been “outreach and engagement” with civil society and the legal fraternity.

Much of Batohi’s time to date has been taken up with the fight for a bigger budget for the prosecuting authority.

“Budget is a massive problem,” Batohi said. “If the NPA is to deliver on the huge demands it faces… we need the budget and we need the people and the skills.”

In a bid to increase the NPA’s autonomy in this regard, Batohi has been finalising the proposal to split the NPA from the Department of Justice — granting the NPA its own accounting officer and the right to negotiate its own budget.

Another priority is what Batohi terms “rebranding the NPA”: Working on the serious perception problem that the prosecuting authority had developed over the past decade.

“We are the lawyers for the people, but the people don’t trust us,” she said.

For the first time, Batohi admitted that when she was initially approached for the job of National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP), she turned it down.

“I had a rather comfortable and interesting job in the Netherlands,” Batohi said. “I said: ‘No, why I should I come back to this craziness in South Africa?’ ”

In her telling, it was Batohi’s son who convinced her that it was her duty to take the job.

“I realised he’s right,” Batohi said.

And despite the steep learning curve of her first four months in the job:

“I have no regrets at all. Every day I have a sense of meaning and purpose in my life.” DM