The recent allegations surrounding Andrea Johnson have prompted renewed debate about the integrity of South Africa's criminal justice system. Politicians are demanding accountability. Commentators are debating whether the proposed Independent Directorate Against Corruption (IDAC) can succeed where earlier institutions have failed.
These are important questions.
But perhaps we are overlooking something even more fundamental.
The rule of law ultimately depends upon a simple social contract: that when people swear to tell the truth, they mean it.
Without that, courts become theatres of competing narratives rather than places where facts can be tested. Justice itself begins to dissolve.
South Africa has become accustomed to hearing judges reject witnesses as dishonest, contradictory or unreliable. Yet prosecutions for perjury remain remarkably uncommon. There are understandable reasons. Prosecutors have finite resources. Courts rightly distinguish between innocent mistakes and deliberate deception.
Perjury is difficult to prove. If one party has lied that can be proved by someone else who doesn’t. Whose word is more believable?
Nevertheless, something important has been lost.
The oath has gradually ceased to command the moral authority it once carried.
Perhaps it is time to recover a simple constitutional principle: deliberately lying under oath is not merely an offence against a judge or a courtroom. It is an offence against every citizen whose liberty depends upon truthful evidence.
Yet this is not only a legal problem. It is also a profoundly human one.
In my long career as a social worker, I have spent much of my professional life counselling people who start off by lying to me. After they get to trust me and realise that I am not a detective or prosecutor they start telling me the truth.
Many lies are not born from malice but from fear. Children growing up in violent homes learn to lie in order to survive. Victims of abuse conceal painful truths. Public officials hide mistakes. Police officers protect colleagues. Even whistleblowers sometimes embellish accounts because they fear they will otherwise not be believed. Politicians protect reputations.
Lying is often an adaptive survival strategy.
The tragedy is that what protects us today often imprisons us tomorrow.
One of history's deepest insights comes from the words attributed to Jesus in John's Gospel: "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:32)
Franciscan Spiritual writer Richard Rohr offers a profound companion thought: "Yes, the truth will set you free. But first it is going to make you miserable."
Anyone who has accompanied people through trauma knows exactly what he means.
Truth hurts before it heals.
That is why our response to perjury should never be driven by vengeance.
Its purpose should be to restore truth as the foundation upon which justice depends.
One remarkable story from our own history illustrates this better than any legal textbook.
At the Kannemeyer Commission, established after the Langa-Uitenhage massacre of March 1985, advocate Halton Cheadle represented many of the victims.
One of them was Kwanele Bucwa, the famous “boy on the bicycle”.
When the 15 year old Bucwa was admitted to hospital after becoming the first person shot by police that day, he gave the authorities a false name. Under apartheid, fearing further persecution, this was hardly irrational.
Before he testified, however, his mother and Halton Cheadle helped him realise that there was only one way forward.
He had to tell the truth.
Under cross-examination, Bucwa openly admitted that he had lied to the police.
Far from destroying his credibility, that confession transformed it.
Because he voluntarily acknowledged his earlier deception, everything else he said under oath became more believable. His honesty helped unravel the police version of one of apartheid's defining atrocities.
The lesson is timeless.
People are not made trustworthy because they have never lied.
They become trustworthy because they finally stop lying. But what convinces them to change course?
A more recent story from Britain gives some clues.
Jonathan Aitken was once one of Britain's most prominent Conservative politicians, serving in John Major's Cabinet and widely regarded as a future party leader. His career collapsed in spectacular fashion after he lied under oath during a libel action against The Guardian. Convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice in 1999, he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, of which he served only seven.
Prison became the beginning rather than the end of his story.
Confronted by the consequences of his own deception, Aitken experienced a profound spiritual transformation. He later trained for the Anglican ministry and today serves as a priest and prison chaplain, devoting much of his life to rehabilitating offenders and walking alongside those who, like himself, have fallen from grace.
His life illustrates something our public discourse often forgets.
Justice and redemption are not opposites. They need one another.
The old saying remains profoundly true: Every saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.
That should apply even to people currently dominating our headlines.
Whether Andrea Johnson committed criminal offences will ultimately be determined in court, not in newspapers. If offences such as perjury can be proved beyond reasonable doubt, they should be prosecuted without fear or favour.
But our objective should never be simply to destroy individuals. Our objective should be to build institutions in which telling the truth becomes safer than maintaining a lie.
One practical step would be to establish a small, highly specialised and genuinely independent prosecutorial unit dedicated to offences that strike at the integrity of the justice system itself, particularly deliberate perjury in serious public-interest cases. Operating under the oversight of a retired judge, such a unit could investigate referrals from courts and commissions of inquiry where there is compelling evidence that sworn testimony has been deliberately falsified. Its purpose would not be to prosecute every inconsistency, but to restore public confidence that an oath still means something.
My nominee for the oversight judge would be Justice Bess Nkabinde. That is because I closely monitored the Nkabinde Inquiry and was amazed how she ensured the process did not fall off the edge after Advocate Shamila Batohi abandoned the witness stand. She and her panel have begun to exorcise the ‘Ghosts of Cato Manor’ which have returned to haunt us again. She understood the emancipatory power of truth and the two whistleblowers I supported, Aris Danikas and Shamilla Williams are now finally beginning to feel vindicated.
Having a special independent prosecutorial unit might also help strengthen confidence in genuine whistleblowers while discouraging the weaponisation of protected disclosures through knowingly false allegations.
However South Africa has spent decades reforming institutions.
Perhaps we as citizens must now also recover an older virtue.
The Constitution ultimately rests not upon Parliament, prosecutors or judges. It rests upon ordinary men and women having the courage to tell the truth when it costs them.
Researching my forthcoming biography Molly Blackburn: Witness to Justice, I was repeatedly struck by one lesson. Again and again, history turned because frightened people decided that truth mattered more than fear.
That remains the challenge before us.
Not because people never lie.
But because justice cannot survive if lies carry no meaningful consequences—and because redemption begins the moment someone finds the courage to tell the truth.
John GI Clarke is a writer, social worker and Justice Peace and Equality monitor.