Ivor Powell speaks to National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka about his plans to bring down the kingpins of crime
When National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka took office, he approached colleagues in the intelligence services requesting what was effectively a hit list.
What the newly appointed crimebuster was looking for was the names of 10 criminal syndicate leaders, kingpins in political violence or other sponsors of organised crime whom the authorities had thus far failed to put behind bars.
“The question I asked was … if we were to concentrate our energies on so and so, would it make a difference, would it reduce the levels of crime in this country? In Cape Town? In the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal? In the car-jacking capital of Gauteng?
“I was looking to create a domino effect, where if you tip one tile, the others come crashing down.”
In the end, Ngcuka says, he was given 22 names. That was 14 months ago. Since then the efforts of his unit have been largely concentrated on bringing down the individuals and networks named in those early intelligence reports.
Names like Gavin Carolus, Rashied Staggie and Ebrahim Jenneker in the Cape; Inkatha Freedom Party militant Philip Powell in KwaZulu-Natal?
Ngcuka will not comment or react beyond a serene and Buddah-like smile. He does, however, note that he and his team have succeeded in getting the top five individuals named in connection with the People against Gangsterism and Drugs- related and gang violence in the Cape out of circulation.
At last count, 24 alleged gangsters, reputed pipe bombers and assorted other militants in the bloody wars centred around Cape Town had been arrested and were facing charges.
But will any of it stick this time? To date the National Directorate of Public Prosecutions has failed signally and in much-publicised asset forfeiture raids like those on alleged Cape Flats ganglords Carolus and Staggie, and allegedly crooked KwaZulu-Natal cop Piet Meyer.
Embarrassingly, nearly every case of asset forfeiture thus far has ended in the return of the assets after courts found holes in the legislation.
But Ngcuka remains unfazed by such reverses. After re-amendments to the Proceeds of Organised Crime Act last month, the law has been toughened up – notably with rewritten clauses allowing for the seizure of criminal proceeds attained before the passing of the law. Ngcuka says he would at this point welcome legal challenges to its enforceability.
But while there’s no doubt Ngcuka the crusader will relish his eventual and long- delayed victory in taking their wealth away from criminals, this is not really the point. His thinking is too subtle for simple revenge.
“We asked ourselves what to do about crime in this country,” he muses. “Do we wait for crime to happen and then act against the perpetrators, or do we act to prevent it? The answer we came up with: a mixture of both.”
He uses the example of Richmond in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands to illustrate his point. Having identified perpetrators of major acts of political violence in the area (but without the required evidence to convict them), Ngcuka says, investigators looked not only to tie them in with notorious acts but also at other and perhaps almost forgotten crimes they may have perpetrated.
Resulting prosecutions and convictions of a relatively small group of such militants have noticeably, and to the credit of the directorate, lowered political tensions in the area.
“I don’t really care if these criminals are in jail on rape charges or for housebreaking or for traffic fines,” Ngcuka asserts. “The point is they are no longer in a position to do further harm, and we are in a position to find longer-term solutions to the problems of crime.”
It is an unusually frank and pertinent take on the usually woolly notion of integrated policing – which in Ngcuka’s book means essentially bringing together three key functions: intelligence (identifying the perpetrators); investigation (finding grounds for prosecution); and prosecution.
In both Richmond and the Cape, the ground-level approach has manifestly worked in recent months, with lower violence statistics than have been recorded since the early 1990s.
This even before high-profile cases – like the murder of United Democratic Movement warlord Sifiso Nkabinde in January – came to court.
Outlining his strategy, Ngcuka invokes the troika of intelligence, investigation and prosecution like a holy trinity. But, and this is the argument behind the formation of the FBI-style Scorpion unit, that trinity needs to be three-in-one as well as one-in-three.
As opposed to earlier units, the Scorpions will not rely on seconded personnel, drawn from the police, the Department of Justice and the intelligence services. But, he acknowledges, the mere mantra of the FBI trinity will not solve all the problems.
Training will also be needed to supplement the drain of skilled personnel from the security forces into private security when the African National Congress government came to power.
“As things stand,” he says, “we don’t have the skills. State resources are spent on employing private firms to do jobs that should be done inside our services.”