Advocate Xolisile Khanyile, advocate Hermione Cronje and advocate Menzi Simelane were in the hot seat on Thursday, vying for the post of National Director of Public Prosecutions. Here are the best and worst moments. It is no longer possible to deny that South Africa’s National Prosecuting Agency (NPA) is riddled with very serious problems, said the former NPA Investigating Directorate (ID) head, Hermione Cronje, while being interviewed for the position of National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP), on Thursday, 11 December.
“You can ask: why am I back here if I think it’s so disastrous? I do think we are at a point in the country now where it’s undeniable that we have serious problems in the NPA, and that we need to actually come up with a diagnosis. “I dispute the narrative that it’s only in complex corruption cases that we’re not doing so well.
Iutterlydispute that. And I think that if we look at the data that is coming out of the courts, it’s a problem across the board,” said Cronje. Cronje quit the NPA ID in December 2021, only 2½ years after her appointment.
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The official line was that she had resigned for “personal reasons”. Daily Maverick reported that she struggled with a limited budget, lack of competence and resistance to bringing in the right people. On Thursday, Cronje said, “I left because I felt that … the space wasn’t there for me to implement the things that I thought should be implemented,” adding that she was “struck by the levels of dysfunction” within the NPA.
Cronje was an assistant to South Africa’s first NDPP, Bulelani Ngcuka, when the NPA was formed in 1998, after Ngcuka recruited her while they were both working in Parliament. She later held several roles in the NPA’s Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU), resigning from the organisation in March 2011. She returned in 2019 as the inaugural head of the ID.
Seated before aseven-person advisory panelon Thursday, Cronje talked at length about the NPA’s many crises — and why she is the person to fix them. NDPP Shamila Batohi, who retires in January 2026, wenton record in August this year sayingthe NPA is “certainly … not in crisis”. Cronje is one ofsix candidates competing for the NPA’s top postand was interviewed along with the chairperson of the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime and former Free State Director of Public Prosecutions, advocate Xolisile Khanyile, and a former NDPP under Jacob Zuma, advocate Menzi Simelane.
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