If you’re looking to get a deeper understanding of why nobody linked to the #GuptaLeaks, Eskom or state capture has even so much as been asked to post bail, Glynnis Breytenbach’s new book, Rule of Law, provides acute insight.
Until she was harassed out of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), the formidable Breytenbach was its toughest nut. She’d worked on cases such as the arms deal, the Barry Tannenbaum Ponzi scheme, the Imperial Crown Trading fraud at Sishen and the prosecution of crime intelligence boss Richard Mdluli.
Breytenbach knows where the NPA’s warts are located. This is what makes her book such a hair-raising roller coaster ride down the winding corridors of the NPA’s Silverton office, through the depressing valleys of political meddling in prosecutions, and all the way through to the rise of impunity in SA society.
She recounts how the NPA’s undoing can be traced back to the arms deal. She points to the awful advice NPA boss Bulelani Ngcuka got in 2002, which led to him charging Schabir Shaik but not then deputy president Jacob Zuma, even though Ngcuka said there was a "prima facie case of corruption against [Zuma]".
She writes: "It became increasingly obvious that there was serious political interference ... for older prosecutors, it signalled the beginning of something we knew would get worse. We didn’t know how to stop it."
The encroaching claustrophobia deepened when former president Thabo Mbeki axed Ngcuka’s successor, Vusi Pikoli, for daring to charge disgraced police boss Jackie Selebi for fraud. And the skies darkened further when Pikoli’s replacement, Moketedi Mpshe, withdrew the (new) criminal charges against Zuma in 2009. "It was immediately very clear that the ANC was running rampant in the NPA."
When Menzi Simelane arrived "and told us bluntly that he was there to implement the policy of the ruling party", veteran prosecutors began polishing their CVs.
"The destruction of the NPA means that it’s now easy to rig all tender processes, because there is no-one to investigate. There are no legal limits," she writes.
Today, Breytenbach is an MP for the DA, so you might say she would argue this. Only there is mounting evidence to attest to what she’s saying.
This week, the Ethics Institute released its first-ever ethics survey, which made for grisly reading. A poll of 1,890 professionals revealed that two of every five people have reported "unethical behaviour", and one in four were actively threatened for doing so.
Breytenbach says Abrahams’ elevation was like taking a child who has just learnt to ride a bicycle with training wheels and giving him a jumbo jet
Most damningly, only 9% of people surveyed thought that "leaders in the public sector are ethical".
So whose job is it to shore up the public’s faith that there is accountability and justice? Shaun Abrahams, the current head of the NPA. Only he seems to be perpetually grazing in far-off fields rather than holding anyone to account for anything serious.
Breytenbach says Abrahams’ elevation was like "taking a child who has just learnt to ride a bicycle with training wheels and giving him a jumbo jet". She recounts how Abrahams, as a junior advocate, had botched a case in which a man murdered his pregnant wife and even confessed to murdering her. Yet the husband "was acquitted".
She’s merciless when it comes to assessing the competence of others in the criminal justice system too. Of Gauteng Hawks head Prince Moketedi she writes: "If breathing were not an involuntary reflex, he’d be dead."
The daughter of a railway clerk and bookkeeper who grew up in Kimberley in the 1960s, Breytenbach is caustic, blunt and, as everyone who writes in the book attests, completely unsuited to politics.
Ngcuka, while writing glowingly of her skills as a prosecutor, adds: "She has no diplomacy. Nothing."
Breytenbach herself admits that politics is an ill fit as "it requires you to be devious and self-promoting".
It seems the NPA is a bit like that too these days. If you want justice, it seems you’re far more likely to get it from the UK’s Public Relations & Communications Association (which axed Bell Pottinger) than from Abrahams’ bunch of roaming political hitmen.
This is why Corruption Watch has approached the US justice department to probe McKinsey’s conduct in SA, where it acted as the bridge between Eskom and Trillian for about R600m in shady payments.
Corruption Watch’s David Lewis says that in this environment of impunity in SA, the odds of anyone "actually being charged let alone found guilty, no matter how criminal their conduct, are extremely long".
Of course, had Breytenbach not been hounded out of the NPA, it may have been a different story.
Abrahams’ elevation was like ‘taking a child who has just learnt to ride a bicycle with training wheels and giving him a jumbo jet’
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