There is no political interference in the prosecutorial proceeding of any case in the country, said National Director of Public Prosecutions Menzi Simelane on Wednesday.
“There isn’t any political interference, and there has not been any political interference.
“I don’t even know how political interference looks,” Simelane said during a public lecture at the Wits University’s Graduate School of Public and Development Management.
He said a crime was a crime and “people need to do their jobs”.
He said the public was allowed to ask questions where it did not understand decisions that were taken.
“What people cannot say to me [is] ‘Promise us that when so and so is accused of something you will prosecute’… You look at the facts in each and every case because they are different.
“Interestingly, people do not say to judges ‘Promise us that when so and so appears before you, you will convict them’ — because it impossible. In law there is no such a word as obvious.”
Simelane said South Africa was “very far” from a Zimbabwe situation because it has a strong judiciary and a political will to ensure that justice is done.
“All we have is corruption like any other country. People should be held to account and cases must be investigated properly,” he said.
Simelane said the National Prosecution Authority (NPA) becoming independent would not make the public trust the institution. He said the public would decide to trust the institution based on its actions.
“There is an ongoing debate on whether the NPA should be independent of government. I respect this, but I do not agree.
“These public institutions can deepen democracy by doing their work properly. If we were to say for us to trust an institution, it had to be independent — what about the army and the police?”
‘Lack of trust for the ANC’
Simelane said the issue in this debate was that people have no trust in the ANC-led government, not the institutions.
He said there was a lot of distrust in the country because people were always prejudiced against a “certain party”.
Simelane said there were challenges facing the NPA — the biggest being work that has to be done.
“The biggest challenge is that there is work to be done but there are still other issues on the side, like the appointment issues.
“It all boils down to lack of trust for the ANC, as I have said before — some opposition parties do not trust deployees of the party.”
He said cadre deployment should not matter because they were there to serve the public. The issue should be whether they were doing the work properly or not.
Simelane said another challenge was convincing prosecutors who had been doing administration work to go back to court.
“We can’t have a situation where a defence has a senior counsel and the state has a newly graduated representative, that’s why we lose cases.
“We have senior prosecutors being paid R800 000 a year, doing administration work. Why can’t those people go back to court and work because they have more experience?” — Sapa