Clean up mess in the judiciary

THERE is always something nauseatingly predictable about the official opening of the High Court. As if reading from a template, a chief justice will mention problems in the courts before blaming lawyers and the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) for the inordinate delay in court cases.

There will be some empathic promise to deal with the backlog of cases.

That routine will be repeated next year. Yet nothing substantial changes.

Our court system remains chaotic.

Chief Justice Sakoane Sakoane slightly deviated from that script but the message was essentially the same. He might not have rattled out the usual statistics about cases that are pending and those that have been resolved.

He however insinuated that the DPP had contributed to the delay in the prosecution of the so-called high-profile cases by appointing one prosecutor who appeared overwhelmed by the colossal magnitude of the cases.

We are sure that the DPP has her own grievances against the chief justice and his judges. She mentioned some of them during her public tiff with the chief justice last year. Now she could point out that she is not the one who delayed appointing foreign judges to hear the cases.

She might say, and with justification, that it was not her actions or lack of them that led to the abrupt resignation of two of the three judges.

Indeed, she is not the one who delayed the reallocation of cases to other judges. And she indeed had nothing to do with the defendants’ various applications that have repeatedly stalled the trials.

It is an unending but pointless Ping-Pong.

Missing from the chief justice’s speech was a frank acknowledgement of the impact of the disharmony between him and the DPP we witnessed last year.

The chief justice did not mention how the courts will work with the prosecution to expedite those trials.

That conversation is long overdue. The animosity between the courts and the prosecution is unhelpful. While the DPP and the chief justice squabbled, Lieutenant General Tlali Kamoli and his co-accused are now in the last month of half a decade in remand prison. At the same time, the families of their alleged victims have been waiting for justice.

This is a serious indictment on our justice system. And it’s not only the high profile cases caught up in the notoriously complicated maze that is our judicial system.

Thousands of civil and criminal cases have been stuck in this man-made jam. Civil cases have been dragging on for so long that they have been overtaken by events and their judgements will only be academic.

There are criminal cases now compromised because they have outlived key witnesses by several years.

The buck stops with both the chief justice and the DPP.

And that includes the responsibility of aggressively pushing for more funding from the government.

The prosecution and the courts are on opposite sides of the justice system but that doesn’t mean they should not work together for justice.

Both exist in pursuit of justice. How to collaborate to deliver that justice is something the DPP and the chief justice should figure out pronto.

Who did and is doing what to create the mess is not an important issue. Just get on with the business of cleaning this embarrassing mess.