ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has admitted that the governing party made a mistake in disbanding the Scorpions and that it was time to bring them back to tackle South Africa’s worsening crime crisis, according to the Sunday Times.
Mbalula is quoted as saying: ‘The model of the Scorpions seemed to be working for us at that time, and to be honest the ANC needs to go back to that.’
He admitted that, as leader of the ANC Youth League, he had played a key role in calling for the disbandment of the Directorate of Special Operations (DSO), commonly known as the Scorpions, in 2009.
‘We were very big critics of the Scorpions, about the way to arrest. But from a quality point of view criminals knew that [when you were] surrounded by the Scorpions, it’s game over.’
Established by then President Thabo Mbeki in 1999, the DSO was a specialised unit of the National Prosecuting Authority tasked with investigating and prosecuting high-level and priority crimes, including organised crime and corruption.
The Sunday Times notes that after it was disbanded, the unit’s prosecutors were absorbed into the NPA and its investigators moved to the new Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, commonly known as the Hawks. The decision was at the time seen by some as a political move.
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