If anyone is capable of turning around the National Prosecuting Agency, it might just be advocate Hermione Cronje — which is why her appointment may be too much to hope for. The appointment of a new National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP) is hugely significant. This is one of the key roles in South Africa that can help shape everyday life for us all for the next decade and define the nature of the political climate.
A captured National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) boss can, at the risk of hyperbole, help bring down the country. That’s why it’s so unfortunate that it feels as if the all-important interview process to nominate candidates to President Cyril Ramaphosa has been hastily backloaded on to the dying embers of the year as an afterthought. For many people, it’s the last full work week for the year — and the country is dragging itself to the finish line.
Inevitably, if you hold NDPP interviews during the last work week of the year, there will be consequences. The main one is that the level of scrutiny and engagement with this process has been lower than it should be for such an important position. To give one example, Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi claimed on Wednesday that the DA — normally hyper-focused on this stuff — had not made a single submission on the candidates.
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Amid criticism of one candidate, in particular, on the list, Kubayi sought to claim at the interviews’ outset that the shortlist of six candidates to be interviewed was not, in fact, a “shortlist” per se. “We have not shortlisted. What we did as a panel was check the suitability of the candidates in terms of meeting the minimum requirements,” declared Kubayi.
This is despite the fact that the Ministry of Justice’sstatementon the interviews referred to “six shortlisted candidates”. But have it your way, Minister Kubayi: it wasn’t a shortlist, it was just a … short list.
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