Exodus of NPA financial investigators to private sector and SIU fuelled by salary disparity – Batohi

20 Nov 2024

The NPA is tasked with prosecuting corruption cases referred to it by the SIU, but it lacks capacity as skilled financial investigators are leaving due to low pay. Some are going to the private sector while others are joining the SIU.

Key financial investigators are leaving the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) because of low pay and they’re not only going to the private sector but to the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), where the salary ranges are almost double what the NPA pays.

NPA boss Shamila Batohi made this revelation on Wednesday, 20 November 2024, in Parliament during a committee meeting at the public accounts watchdog Scopa.

She was part of a delegation from the NPA, SIU and Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks), who briefed the committee on issues of SIU referrals to the NPA across all departments, entities and municipalities.

When Batohi was asked to explain what she meant when she said her staff were leaving for not only the private sector but also the SIU, MPs were silent and shook their heads.

She said the disparity in salaries needed to be dealt with so “we can hire people at better salary scales. Otherwise, it makes it very, very difficult to build capacity that we want to within government and within the NPA in particular.”

She said three or four financial investigators from the NPA’s Investigating Directorate Against Corruption and one from the Asset Forfeiture Unit were earning between R300,000 and R350,000 at the NPA and were hired by the SIU on salaries in excess of R1-million.

“We are training people that get taken away by the private sector and, particularly, trying to deal with transformation … Black African women and men, if you train them, they get stolen by the private sector very, very quickly, and so we are constantly trying to build capacity and, you know, you can’t stop people from leaving,” she told the committee.

She said staff were also leaving the Hawks.

“In government, if we want to deal with financial crimes, we have to have a dispensation that allows us to attract the right skills and to keep them,” Batohi said.

“This month, from the first of November, we have lost 33 members who have been appointed elsewhere, promotion and the like.”

She said part of the problem was that the NPA, unlike the SIU, is not independent, despite efforts in the previous administration to look at funding models to capacitate it.

Hawks boss Godfrey Lebeya said: “I want to say that the people that have been properly trained to investigate serious financial crimes in South Africa belong in the serious commercial crime environment – that is the area where most of the members are highly sought after.”

He said the Hawks had also lost members.

“This month, from the first of November, we have lost 33 members who have been appointed elsewhere, promotion and the like.”

Lebeya said that, based on SIU referrals, there were 11,359 active case dockets with a total of 3,139 cases pending in court. A further 8,220 cases are under active investigation.

Read more: ‘Trends in rule of law and justice do not bode well’ — prosecuting boss Shamila Batohi

During the briefing, Batohi repeated comments she made earlier in the week, saying, “You cannot prosecute your way out of corruption.”

Committee member Athol Trollip said he was “taken aback”.

Batohi said did not want to minimise the importance of prosecutions in terms of holding people accountable, whether it was imprisonment or another outcome.

“So, accountability, prosecution is critical, and we’ve said it’s a two-pronged strategy to dealing with these types of crimes,” she explained.

“One is prosecutions accountability and, two, another aspect of accountability is bringing back the stolen money.

“It is a critical aspect of the government’s response to dealing with corruption … It can only be truly effective if it works hand in hand with a very, very clear strategy to deal with the prevention aspects upfront to ensure that we have good governance, to ensure that we have ethical leadership, then the impact of prosecutions will be even greater.”

Read more: ‘We cannot prosecute our way out of corruption’ – NPA boss Batohi

“I want to really make that clear and that is why it’s very encouraging that our national anti-corruption strategy focuses very much on the prevention aspect to ensure ethical leadership … but of course I want to emphasise prosecutions is a strong deterrent – people do not like to go to prison.”

Batohi told the committee that there were 39 “high-profile” State Capture-related matters which had been enrolled in the country’s courts.

She said almost 700 government officials and 1,000 individuals from the private sector have been convicted on corruption-related matters in recent years. Through the Asset Forfeiture Unit, R3-billion in value has been recovered through SIU referrals. DM

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