Johnathan Paoli
Former President Thabo Mbeki has called out the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for its failures to prosecute cases referred to it by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and denied allegations made by former National Director of Public Prosecutions Vusi Pikoli as reported by News24’s Karyn Maughan.
President Mbeki issued a statement on Friday, and said that failure to challenge allegations made by Maughan would perpetuate a false narrative of executive intervention in the failure to bring justice to the victims of apartheid.
“The NPA must demonstrate enough integrity by apologising for not processing the TRC cases, rather than engage in dishonourable behaviour of trying to hide behind a fig leaf which is nothing more than pure fabrication,” Mbeki said.
According to Mbeki there was no interference in the work of the NPA during his tenure, despite a 2021 SCA judgement which found that the agency’s investigations into the TRC cases were stopped as a result of an executive decision which amounted to interference.
The former President insisted that the submissions were unfounded and if the investigations Pikoli referred to were stopped, it was a result of the agency’s own decision making process and not at the behest of the government.
He said there was no record of a single instance when the NPA stopped investigating and prosecuting any case on account of “executive interference” during the period between 1999 and 2008.
Mbeki said the agency should publish and reveal who exactly gave this alleged order and asked why it accepted and respected what had been an illegal instruction.
He said that in light of Pikoli’s strong stance on independence as could be seen in his investigation of the late former National Commissioner of Police Jackie Selebi, it remained surprising that he “buckled under the pressures of the executive” concerning the TRC cases.
In addition, Mbeki said the so-called “back-door amnesties” Maughan referred to was a misunderstanding of his administration’s decision to grant a possible amnesty to some of the political prisoners years after the dissolution of the TRC, but that ultimately this did not happen due to the court’s ruling that such an intervention would violate the TRC Act – an issue he addressed in a joint sitting of the Houses of Parliament on November 21, 2007.
Mbeki said that there was never any Minister of Justice who was ever authorised to instruct any NDPP to act in this manner and that he was never approached by any official from the agency in a complaint on the violation of the NDP’s independence.
Pikoli has not officially commented on the matter at the time of publishing.
INSIDE POLITICS
