What Made Shamila Batohi’s Term as National Director of Public Prosecutions Incredible

That Shamila Batohi’s long (and often celebrated) term at the head of South Africa’s prosecutions service is concluding without the incarceration of even one senior politician is an astonishing outcome in a country that has spent years watching state capture described, itemised, documented, and argued over in public, with the Zondo Commission turning the scandal into a national documentary that never ended.

If accountability was the destination, South Africa was given the route map, the street names, and the house numbers. And then, at the end of it all, nothing.

Batohi came into the job in 2019 with the kind of goodwill most public officials can only dream of. She was presented as insulated from internal politics, serious, competent, and ready to restore credibility to a National Prosecuting Authority battered by the Zuma era. She spoke of prioritising corruption in both the public and private sectors. She reversed certain earlier decisions and took steps meant to signal that the old dysfunction would not continue. The country was invited, once again, to believe that the age of impunity was finally closing.

Instead, the age of obfuscation flourished.

Her leadership repeatedly stressed structural problems, budget constraints, and investigative weakness. Really, there was too little money, and too few capable staff, to secure even one top conviction? The criminal justice system has a budget of billions of rand and access to the top legal minds in the country. That many people in the media and business were taken in by all the excuses (and that many remain so) is incredible too.

Not that billions of rand or top legal minds were needed as the evidence of state-capture wrongdoing was so overwhelming that a junior state prosecutor, fresh out of university, would have had no trouble securing long-term convictions with the evidence that was littered around the public domain. The evidence was, in fact, so overwhelming and openly accessible that it must have taken some effort to avoid even an accidental conviction.

Batohi will leave office praised by politicians (most enthusiastically, no doubt, by those she did not put in prison), as well as by business and much of the media and civil society, for her professed intent. There is a grim irony in that.

Her legacy, however, will be defined, not by what she said she wanted to do, but rather by what did not happen. She inherited prosecutorial responsibility for the most comprehensive corruption scandal in modern South African history but ended her term with no high-level convictions to show for it. That is not a footnote to that term, it is its whole story.