Shamila Batohi, head of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), has warned Parliament that cutting the NPA’s budget would weaken the fight against corruption.
“Fighting corruption is a priority for the NPA and needs a huge investment and commitment from government,” she told the Portfolio Committee on Justice and Correctional Services on Wednesday.
Batohi said the proposed Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) budget cuts would undo the gains the NPA had made and ‘undermine the president’s commitment to a rebuild the NPA’.
News24 quoted Batohi as saying that the recent corruption-related cases represented only a ‘tiny, tiny pinpoint on a massive iceberg’, but that fighting corruption ‘is a priority for the NPA and needs a huge investment and commitment from government’.
She was speaking after presenting the NPA’s Annual Report for 2019-2020 and a report on the first quarter of 2020 to the committee on Wednesday morning.
‘The wheels of justice are turning. It has been slow. In the past, these cases might never have seen the inside of a courtroom,’ she said, adding that things had changed at the NPA.
She told the committee that, when she joined the organisation, she found it was under-resourced in terms of skill, capacity and funding, and had lost credibility, and that staff morale was at an all-time low.
An additional budget allocation had been vital to rebuilding an independent, professional, accountable and credible NPA, and embarking on the biggest recruitment drive in the organisation’s history to appoint fresh, committed people of the utmost integrity.
‘We must be really careful that the NPA does not lose any of the money it has received,’ Batohi said.