Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - Endemic corruption, maladministration and austerity’s most savage cuts are barely visible.
Ambulances failing to respond to emergency calls and sick people packed in overflowing hospital waiting rooms make the news because that could affect you or your family any day.
Potholes in the road evoke motorists’ and cyclists’ wrath, as do missed bin collections or unattended overflowing sewerage tunnels.
But the near collapse of the entire criminal justice system can happen right under our noses, and none but judges, lawyers, prosecutors and prison staff know anything about it.
Prisons did top the news last week when in another extraordinary day in the life of the “Facebook rapist” saga that has gripped the nation, Thabo Bester and his lover, Dr Nandipha Magudumana, arrived back in South Africa last Thursday in a chartered jet, and are now behind bars.
And in another significant development in the saga, former Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron confessed to a parliamentary committee last Thursday that he leaked information on Bester’s escape to GroundUp due to the slow investigation by law enforcement officials who had initially requested that the revelation be kept silent.
The Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services (Jics), which inspects prisons, turned to the media to reveal that the burnt body found in Mangaung prison last year was not that of Bester. Cameron, the Jics’s inspecting judge, said they met with the police in August last year with the DNA and autopsy findings he and the CEO, Vick Misser, put together.
Cameron said the police asked him not to publicise these findings to allow them to complete their investigations.
“When we met the SAPS, we met with the top seven police officers involved in Bloemfontein. They were on top of it. All of them were on top of it.
“The police said to us at that stage that they have two more witnesses in Mangaung and don’t want anything publicised at this point, and we deferred to that,” he said.
However, after police interviewed the two witnesses and investigations into their findings were moving slowly, Cameron said he contacted the media in September.
“I relied on my belief in the integrity of an editor whom I’ve known for a long time. I trust his integrity greatly. The second thing is that I supplied GroundUp only with publicly accessible information. I acted to alert the public.
“The people I alerted acted with care, caution, immense responsibility and scepticism,” he said.
Judge Cameron admitted that everyone dragged their feet in the matter, particularly G4S.
“G4S thought they could get away with dismissing two or three lower personnel ... The report from G4S persisted in the fiction that Bester had died.”
Global security company G4S, which runs the Mangaung Correctional Centre, has been summoned to appear before Parliament’s justice and correctional services committee to account for the Thabo Bester saga after it failed to attend an urgent parliamentary meeting citing confidentiality and contractual obligations. The committee heard that a Bloemfontein constable flagged that Magudumana kept coming to claim the burnt body found in prison.
Cameron said the policeman put a stop to this, leading to Magudumana’s urgent application in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria. Cameron noted that a brigadier in legal services in Bloemfontein heard of this and stopped it.
“She got an SMS in the afternoon ...she intervened and urgently contacted the state attorney in Pretoria and got a notice of opposition put in. And that answering affidavit, lodged in August, also opened up matters for Jics. I congratulate both those members of the SAPS,” he said.
Minister Ronald Lamola, a semi-amateur politician, drew growls from colleagues and the public even as he apologised for the government’s failure to communicate Bester’s escape on time.
“I want to take this opportunity to apologise to the victims of convicted rapist Thabo Bester and the people of South Africa that he was let loose by G4S officials. As DCS, we take full responsibility for this as we’re the custodians of the Correctional Services Act on behalf of the people of South Africa,” Lamola told the committee.
The tottering edifice in the criminal justice system is only kept going by the superhuman goodwill of the dwindling numbers operating it.
Who else sees it beyond frequent-flyer criminals? The public – victims and survivors, witnesses and litigators – may only touch it once in a lifetime: then they find delays, adjournments and collapsed cases, and prison escapes deeply distressing. The criminal justice cluster ministers suffer one of any department’s deepest year-on-year budget cuts.
The Treasury knows this is a secret world, hidden from public eyes, as courts are removed from the local community, an integral part no longer – the same with prisons, a place of mystery and secrecy.
Courts are so packed that clerks book in as many as seven extra cases, summoning lawyers, witnesses, victims and defendants from afar to wait all day, hoping a case collapses to open a slot for another next in line. If not, they are all summoned on another date to lose another day off work; child care rearranged, carers rebooked.
Cases are often adjourned several times or collapsed altogether from bungled evidence collection.
Frequent electricity blackouts have also added to the court and prison problems.
This is further evidence that one shock inspection report after another have thudded on to ministers’ desks, many on the 240 prisons that accommodate about 190 000 inmates, as well as the two privately run jails, revealing a prison estate in crisis.
In the early years of our democracy, journalists could regularly visit any prison with due notice – and prison officials would speak out about problems. Now they are frightened into silence because of fear of victimisation by members of clandestine networks personally benefiting from corruption.
In the past decade, the shutters came down, and it’s virtually impossible for journalists visiting prisons to get co-operation from government officials, except for a rare manicured walk-about with a minister. Why not?
Because what the media would see and hear would be too disgusting.
Because desperate staff might say too much, including discontent with working conditions and the controversial implementation of employment equity policies. Because the worst are too out of control.
Secrecy suggests shame. But where scrutiny by the press is denied or evaded, as it is now in Bester’s case and anywhere else, the effects of corruption, maladministration and austerity are on display.
Nyembezi is a social commentator and activist
Cape Times