Poisoned chalice: Batohi's legacy of prosecutorial collapse

Under her the NPA went from crisis to catastrophe

- Bongani Mdakane

By any fair reckoning, the one charge that cannot be levelled at Adv Shamila Batohi is that she has fulfilled the promise of her term of office.

Appointed six years ago to rescue the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) from the wreckage of state capture, her arrival was met with fanfare and hope. What followed, however, was not a prosecutorial renaissance but an era of mounting failure, legal embarrassment and institutional decay.

Batohi inherited a broken institution, yes, but under her leadership, the NPA has gone from crisis to catastrophe. If success was the goal, then one might be forgiven for assuming failure became the actual metric of achievement. So consistently has the NPA stumbled that its credibility now lies in tatters - scorned by the courts, doubted by the public, and ridiculed in legal circles.

From the farcical Gupta extradition fiasco, to the shambolic prosecution of Matshela Koko, the crumbled case against Timothy Omotoso, and the legal thrashing in the Moroadi Cholota matter, Batohi's tenure reads like a compendium of institutional implosion.