Peter Dickson
Minister of Justice Penuell Maduna has set legal tongues wagging again, this time after dragging Eastern Cape courts through the mud in a statement to the National Assembly last week following his recent visit to the province.
Maduna, who publicly sacked Bisho director of public prosecutions Leon Langeveldt on the spot during a surprise visit to the Mdantsane Magistrate’s Court, told MPs the Eastern Cape’s lower courts were pictures of “minimal productivity and no discipline” with magistrates and prosecutors appearing “drunk in court”.
“One official had to be dragged out of a shebeen when we demanded to see him,” Maduna added before slamming the Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, Bisho and Umtata high courts.
Maduna said statistics from Bisho proved that if it had not been for apartheid’s former independent Ciskei bantustan, there would have been no need for prosecutor’s offices in the present Eastern Cape capital.
“At Bisho the workload is below average in almost all respects, yet the district rolls get totally out of hand and the administration of justice is on the brink of collapse,” he said. In Umtata, “apathy and lack of effective control has led to many outstanding and pending files, some dating as far back as 1991”.
Maduna, who added he had been “deeply disturbed” by what he had found at township and rural magistrates’ courts, said the Transkei ave-rage in finalising a matter from the first lower court appearance to a high court decision was 759 days compared to the national average of 520 days.
The Port Elizabeth High Court had “managed only 51 prosecutions” in 1998, while the Grahamstown High Court had fared no better, Maduna said, adding he had been told on inquiry that the reason was a three-and-a-half month recess during the year.
But Eastern Cape Director of Public Prosecutions Les Roberts, who oversees Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, said this week that Maduna’s caseload information followed a British-sponsored trial audit instituted by National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka “and it was emphasised to us that it was still a measuring exercise, not an accepted norm for proving we’ve failed”.
Added a senior Eastern Cape prose-cutor: “This is the minister shooting first and thinking later. The matter is a bit more complicated than that. It’s like saying how long is a piece of string. You cannot judge productivity by the number of cases alone as they all have different time frames – some take months, even years, and others a week and a day.
“It’s like measuring a law firm’s success by the number of its clients. A firm may only have three clients, but if those clients are First National Bank, Anglo American and Boeing, are they still unsuccessful?”