POINT OF ORDER
TIM COHEN: Shaun the Sheep can stop the fleecing
‘The reason for putting the charge immediately is simply to make sure the Guptas don’t scarper’
Oh, humour. What would we do without it? In response to the decision by the National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA’s) Shaun Abrahams to disappear from view at the exact moment he might be expected to be in full flight with arms full of affidavits and summonses, some wag has apparently opened a missing persons docket for him at a Johannesburg police station.
If this were the US, he would be appearing on milk cartons soon. Abrahams was the man who stood up and furiously said: "The days of disrespecting the NPA are over." It seems like an aeon ago. Who respects the NPA now? Not many. The jokes aimed at Shaun the Sheep are not entirely fair because, in fact, the formal responsibility for arresting the Guptas falls not on Abrahams and the NPA, but on the head of the Hawks — and that position has been, deliberately one senses, repeatedly given to incompetents. We expect the NPA to be at the forefront of combating serious crime because that is what they once did. But recall, as soon as the Zuma administration came into power, it carried out initiatives begun during the Mbeki administration to hobble corruption investigations.In the process of changing the Scorpions to the Hawks, the innovative idea of prosecutors leading investigations was scrapped and replaced with the more bureaucratic procedure of a strict division between the police and t...
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