Mervyn+Bennun+on+the+NPA,+draft+to+Business+Day

To: Letters to the Editor, Business Day, P O Box 1745, Saxonwold, 2132.

From: Dominic Tweedie, 36 Byron Road, Lombardy East, 2090.

Dear Editor,

Mervyn Bennun is a believer when it comes to the NPA, but he lacks the guts to confront what the rest of us can plainly see. He would prefer to take us on a forced march through the jungles of legislation and constitutional detail, where he certainly has the advantage, and to postpone the moment when the gaze of the vulgar crowd may reach beyond his expedient sophistries.

That vulgar gaze has long since noticed an exposed and open rivalry between two armed agencies of the state revealed as much by events, as by the Khampepe Commission. One of these agencies, the NPA, is scheming to arrest the head of the other, the Commissioner of Police. The latter had previously demanded the subordination of the NPA to his command.

The SA commentariat is partisan and divided. Those who continue to urge the NPA to arrest Commissioner Selebi would be in an uproar of rage if it were, instead, the police who were attempting to lock up Adv. Pikoli.

Bennun’s carefully-selected point of departure is the 1998 Act that established the NPA as a hybrid investigative/prosecutorial agency with seniority over the police in any given investigation, and better pay and conditions. By taking this act as an unexamined given, Bennun begs the most important question, the one that is popping up loudly in public all the time, like a many-headed Hydra.

Perhaps if the relationship between investigation and prosecution had been entirely changed, in 1998, to what it is in France, for example, then we might be coping by now. But the partisans of an investigative judiciary shrank away from frankness. They introduced their plan in a cowardly and surreptitious way, hoping to wear down the remainder of the previous system (where police and prosecutorial powers were fully separated) by a slow drip of smears and disparagements.

The consequent competitive dual system created a culture of abuse of state agencies for personal advancement, and hence for political gain as well. The SAPS, of course, are the same police we are familiar with, and they are not perfect. The greater scandal is the purportedly pristine NPA. Or rather, it is the continued blind support for the scandalous NPA given by the Bennuns of this world, and by otherwise respectable people of that general kind (academics, professionals, and intellectuals).

Once the path of smuggling had been chosen by the promoters of an investigative judiciary, shameless deceptions had to follow. Legal experts like Bennun are happy to imply that the issue of a warrant, for example, is done on the initiative of an investigating magistrate in this country, and therefore already carries the odium of a conviction, when they are fully aware that we have no such creatures here. Punishments, such as the currently ubiquitous “suspensions”, are held to rightfully precede conviction (whereupon conviction, of course, becomes redundant). Grotesque “plea bargaining” becomes the norm. Solid respect for due process melts into air.

All of this has followed from a disastrous, disguised, second-guessing, and post-constitutional push by some of the lawyers and the judges to extend their turf into the field of investigation. The chickens are coming home to roost.

Yours,

Dominic Tweedie

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