While the GOOD Party has praised Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi’s announcement of the creation of 19 permanent National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) posts to investigate Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) cases, it wants a “proper explanation” from government for the “deliberate” non-prosecution of the cases for more than twenty years.

GOOD secretary-general Brett Herron said while the increase in posts is good for equal accountability, it is important to know who decided to ignore the TRC recommendations on further investigations and prosecutions, and why.

“…because this knowledge is fundamental to the integrity of South Africa’s political settlement of more than thirty years ago. The non-prosecution of these cases – together with the slow pace of social, spatial and economic transformation since the advent of democracy – feed a rising narrative that South Africa’s political settlement was a stitch-up between the African National Congress (ANC) and National Party, and directly threaten the Constitutional principles of justice, equality and non-racialism,” he pointed out.

Herron explained that last year former President Thabo Mbeki “vigorously denied” repeated allegations from former NPA head Vusi Pikoli, that Pikoli was instructed by his political head, then-Minister of Justice Bridget Mabandla, not to prosecute TRC-recommended cases.

Herron stated that over the past few years, since the 2017 re-opening of the inquest into the death in detention of Ahmed Timol in 1971, the NPA has enrolled a “trickle” of TRC cases.

However, he pointed that Kubayi is promising more – including re-examining the 1960 death of ANC President and Nobel Peace Laureate Chief Albert Luthuli.

Herron believes only the ANC can answer why it “lacked the appetite,” at a time it when it held “unfettered political power” for thirty years, to reinvestigate the death of its former President.

“Its official opposition for most of that period, the Democratic Alliance, has had no interest in further prosecutions as most perpetrators would fall into its broad constituency,” he said.