Since 1998, weak prosecution and conviction rates, as well as a large backlog of unresolved court cases, have increasingly characterised SA’s criminal justice system.
In recent years, it has been under pressure to implement the recommendations of several judicial inquiries aimed at combating corruption and organised crime.
Tangible law-enforcement action demanded by the public has stagnated, reflecting both flat court performance and a decline in prosecutorial power for the increasing number of implicated people.
Together, these conditions have created a petri dish for chronic concern.
This explains why several of SA’s most prominent civil society organisations’ leaders are increasingly recognising that our criminal justice system is sliding into deep crisis.
They are now calling for urgent reform of the National Prosecuting Authority, arguing that systemic weaknesses — rather than individual failures — are undermining its effectiveness.
The call for urgent reform comes through The Prosecution Project, launched on April 1 as a national initiative led by the University of the Western Cape’s Dullah Omar Institute under Africa Criminal Justice Reform.
Of paramount concern is that the National Prosecuting Authority Act, hastily drafted in 1998, is outdated and no longer suited to tackling complex crimes, as it does not empower the NPA to deal effectively with corruption, commercial crime, organised crime and crimes involving politicians.
Calling for a series of interventions suggests that there is no longer disagreement about the problem.
This is a welcome initiative, as fixing what ails the system will take collaborative action.
The framework created by the legislation leaves unclear boundaries between the NPA and government administration, and weak protections from attacks by the subjects of prosecution, and too much room for administrative and political interference
The question is whether the government will continue to treat the NPA legislation as being about managing constraints or breaking out of them.
Over the years, the government has prioritised amending the NPA legislation to regulate the not-fit-for-purpose prosecution scheme more than allowing it to flourish through fixing the original problems.
The framework created by the legislation leaves unclear boundaries between the NPA and government administration, and weak protections from attacks by the subjects of prosecution, and too much room for administrative and political interference.
Fresh evidence of these shortcomings has emerged at the Khampepe commission of inquiry into alleged political interference in TRC prosecutions, as well as at the Nkabinde inquiry, which is investigating suspended South Gauteng deputy public prosecutor Andrew Chauke’s fitness for office.
Speaking at the project launch, Jean Redpath said key policy decisions made in the late 1990s led to a steady decline in performance.
While conviction numbers rose in the early 2000s, this was driven by short-term interventions and later sustained by minor drug cases, masking deeper problems.
These policy decisions were never intended to solve all the NPA problems.
This is a public service, like so many others, chronically overloaded and underfunded.
Since a Constitutional Court ruling decriminalised private cannabis use, conviction rates have dropped sharply, falling below 1996 levels by 2024/2025.
Delays and inefficiencies remain widespread, with a quarter of regional court cases taking more than three years and many withdrawn.
Commercial crime prosecutions are particularly weak, with conviction rates dropping dramatically despite rising offences.
But the current legislation is an important legacy of the concerted effort to improve, hence the importance of collaboration when introducing reforms.
The current picture remains that of a broken prosecution pipeline with critical gaps that weaken the journey from investigation to conviction due to shortages of specialist skills, weak co-operation and integration between investigators and prosecutors, and inadequate professional qualification and status. That matters.
When the pipeline breaks, serious cases stall or collapse.
Every stalled case deepens the accountability gap. This points to the same conclusion: the current legislative model is not working. That matters too.
However, introducing piecemeal practices is not an appropriate strategy.
Structural concerns mean the prosecutorial independence question will continue to dominate the debate.
They include a lack of cross-cutting performance indicators, vulnerable leadership appointments, control over expenditure, inadequate funding, limited oversight and accountability mechanisms, and anomalous pay scales.
Civil society organisations are advocating for reforms at a time when the government of national unity promises to adopt a fresh approach to the systematic weaknesses in the criminal justice system.
The project’s undertaking begins to probe the deeper question of what the citizens need to bring about change.
It calls for law reforms that must enable true independence, particularly in relation to appointments and removals of the top 15 leaders by the president, budget control, and transparency and oversight.
Their critique of the NPA legislation reflects the broad, well-grounded dissatisfaction with the government’s self-imposed constraints.
South Africans increasingly believe that serious crimes, especially corruption, do not have consequences.
This crisis of trust threatens the entire accountability framework and the country’s political and socioeconomic stability.
Prosecutorial decisions can be finely balanced and extremely difficult.
Lack of resources, especially for building specialist capacity to professionalise the status of prosecutors, ensuring the budget for ad hoc expenditure on specialist skills, and strengthening accredited training pathways, means that serious cases will continue to collapse, and make reaching the right ones even harder.
There are some grounds for hope of gradual improvement resulting from legislative reform, and a shift towards greater openness and accountability.
But openness alone cannot repair a system under strain.
There must also be strengthening of leadership accountability and implementation of meaningful and measurable oversight.
All these concerns point to valuing prosecutorial independence and the criminal justice system’s effectiveness alongside the rule of law and the supremacy of the constitution.
That we should welcome and embrace. SA has no shortage of diagnoses for its criminal justice system malaise.
What it lacks is a coherent plan. Let us co-create that plan.
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