Chantelle Benjamin
27 June 2003
Johannesburg — WHEN the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) discovered employees in its human resources department had allegedly created ghost workers and pocketed their pay, the NPA admitted its embarrassment and suspended the entire department.
The NPA said all employees would be investigated in an effort to prevent any future incidents.
Officials said that apart from a special team to investigate staff appointments across the country, the Integrity Management Unit would review the organisation to look for weaknesses.
This forced the little-known unit into the spotlight.
According to the unit's head, Dipuo Mvelase, it intends to achieve its latest task as it did when it monitored the Scorpions with the help of the public.
The unit was formed in 2001 by National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka to investigate and monitor the elite Scorpions investigating unit and to limit opportunities for corruption within that unit.
The thinking at the time was that the staff employed by the Scorpions, tasked with rooting out crime and corruption, had to be above reproach.
They also had to be able to withstand attempts to corrupt them by criminals who would be looking for ways to compromise members of the unit.
Neither the Scorpions nor the Asset Forfeiture Unit has had any allegations of misconduct levelled against them since the units were established.
When it was announced last year that the Integrity Management Unit would extend its task to investigating the NPA , it was not made clear what a mammoth task that would be .
The authority consists the Directorate of Special Operations better known as the Scorpions; the Asset Forfeiture Unit; and the National Prosecuting Service, which assists and co-ordinates traditional prosecuting structures countrywide.
There are also supplementary services like the Specialised Commercial Crime Unit, witness protection and the Sexual Offences and Community Affairs units.
The Integrity Management Unit has six employees, of which two are investigators.
"With the focus initially on the Scorpions and the Asset Forfeiture Unit, the unit remained small with limited resources," says Mvelase.
At a meeting with Ngcuka two weeks ago to discuss the unit's new responsibilities, it was decided "not to grow the unit too quickly" but to increase staff as the need arose, says Mvelase.
"The unit works by focusing on the entire organisation, to identify where it could be the most vulnerable which in most cases is in human resources or finances."
The unit takes a three-fold approach to corruption prevent ion, public education and enforcement.
"The main purpose of prevention is to protect us against those from outside the organisation who wish to corrupt us," Mvelase says.
"But we also want to look critically at systems within the organisations and determine where there are vulnerabilities which is important because of the sensitive nature of our work."
The Integrity Management Unit needs to devise disciplinary measures and staff need to be informed about the NPA 's rules.
"We are concerned not only with the person who breaks the rules, but with his supervisor who may have been lax in enforcing the rules," she says.
"If there is a weakness, someone will find a way to exploit it.
"There is still a high level of tolerance of corruption and unethical behaviour within our society, so it is important to change people's mindset so that they recognise corruption and see it as an offence."
She says a large portion of the unit's information comes from the justice department's toll-free complaints line. Every complaint is investigated.
"The public plays a very important role with regard to policing the NPA, and we need to get the message out to more people so that they are aware that they can report corruption."
Many of the complaints pertain to prosecutors, whom the public alleges to be corrupt or dishonest.
"In some cases they're valid and the matter is then referred to the police for criminal charges.
"But sometimes the public does not understand how the system works and prosecutors, because they are working with large case backlogs, can be insensitive and don't bother to explain what they are doing," she says.
"So when a case is suddenly withdrawn, victims of crime assume that some corruption is going on that some deal was struck with the defence team.
"Prosecutors are being alerted to this fact and encouraged to be more sensitive to the needs of victims and to treat them as such."
Mvelase says she is under no illusions about the challenge facing the unit, which has to perform its task while respecting the requirements of the constitution.
"We are only 10 years into our democracy, and we have a rightsorientated society where everyone is innocent until proven guilty," she says.
"While the human resource division of the NPA has been suspended pending the investigation, we also have to ensure that they are not being treated as criminals, but are being dealt with justly."
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