The NPA's claimed 74% murder conviction rate, in a nation burdened by violence, invites reflection, the writer says. Can we continue to forsake the principles of justice in favour of superficial triumphs?
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As a young man in high school, I spent many afternoons lost in the pages of Scotland Yard novels. I was captivated by the detective: methodical, sharp-minded,and quietly determined. He was not a bureaucrat chasing targets, but an artisan of truth, standing between chaos and order with intellect, patience, and institutional support.
To my young mind, justice worked because the system respected those who did the hard work. Reality has since taught me otherwise.
In South Africa, justice does not merely fail; it fragments. And when it fragments, we are encouraged to celebrate the fragments that still shine.
Today, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) proudly proclaims a 74% murder conviction rate. On the surface, the statistic glistens like a Rolls-Royce, refined, elite, and engineered to signal performance excellence. Yet for those who observe the criminal justice system from its foundations, overburdened police stations, detective offices stacked with unsolved dockets, and communities numbed by violence — the shine conceals rot. Only months earlier, the South African Police Service (SAPS) presented a proposed murder detection rate of 11.33%, a figure so alarming that Parliament described it, correctly, as a surrender to criminals.
This was not the language of commentators. It was the language of democratic oversight. On April 24, 2025, the Portfolio Committee on Police stated that it found it “disconcerting” that SAPS planned for such a low detection rate. Viewed together with the closure of nearly 80 000 unsolved murder cases since 2018, the Committee concluded that the target projected “an unresponsive SAPS that lacks the will and urgency to solve South Africa’s high murder rate”. When the state plans for failure, retreat becomes policy.
The disturbing contrast between planned investigative collapse and prosecutorial celebration does not signify success; it reveals a justice system structurally divideda gainst itself.
The Mirage Behind the 74%
The NPA’s 74% conviction rate is not false, but it is misleading. It counts only those cases that survive to verdict. It excludes the thousands withdrawn, struck off the roll, or quietly abandoned long before trial because investigations failed, witnesses disappeared, or evidence decayed. These cases vanish into official categories with neutral names - “poor quality investigations”, “insufficient evidence” - yet behind each label is a victim denied closure.
This accounting method allows the NPA to celebrate outcomes at the end of a severely damaged conveyor belt while disowning responsibility for the wreckage upstream. The result is institutional self-preservation disguised as excellence. Survivorship bias becomes performance measurement.
The Berlin Wall Within Justice
What South Africa has built is an invisible Berlin Wall inside its criminal justice system. On one side stand SAPS detectives, particularly at station level, overworked, under-resourced, publicly blamed, and structurally abandoned. On the other side stands the NPA, elite, specialised, insulated from frontline failure, and increasingly protective of its statistical identity.
The wall is reinforced by a dangerous belief: that the NPA must not be identified with poor conviction performance arising from SAPS failures. This belief may protect reputations, but it destroys justice. Prosecutors do not investigate crime in a vacuum. They inherit the quality, or lack thereof, produced at the investigative stage. To deny shared responsibility is to deny practical reality.
Civil society institutions, including the Dullah Omar Institute, have warned for years that fragmentation and elite insulation sit at the heart of South Africa’s justice crisis. Prosecutorial independence was never designed to mean prosecutorial isolation. Independence is a shield against political interference, not an excuse to retreat from systemic accountability.
The Detective as a Scarce Skill
Within SAPS leadership persists a dangerous myth: that detective work is not a scarce skill. This misunderstanding is corrosive. A competent detective must be a legal technician, a forensic thinker, a trauma-informed interviewer, and a procedural strategist, often simultaneously, and often while carrying between 300 and 500 dockets.
Detectives operate under conditions in which failure is predictable. When cases collapse on technical grounds, public anger lands on the investigator, not on the institutional design that guarantees overload. The result is demoralisation, not reform. Over the past decade, more than 10 000 experienced detectives have left the SAPS. This is not merely a brain drain; it is a soul drain. You cannot replace decades of street-won judgement with mass recruitment drives. Justice is not manufactured; it is practiced.
Constitutional Incoherence
This fragmentation is not only operationally unsound; it is constitutionally incoherent. Section 205(3) of the Constitution obliges SAPS to prevent, combat, and investigate crime. Section 179 mandates the NPA to institute criminal proceedings on behalf of the state. These provisions describe a single constitutional project. They do not permit institutional success to be measured in isolation.
When SAPS budgets for failure while the NPA celebrates selective success, the state fractures a unified constitutional duty into defensible fragments. The Constitution does not allow the investigative arm to plan for defeat nor the prosecutorial arm to conclude victory over a surviving minority of cases. Justice is either delivered as a continuum or it is not delivered at all.
The Case for Joint Accountability
\What South Africa needs is not better slogans, targets, or dashboards. It needs joint accountability frameworks that bind SAPS and the NPA to shared responsibility across the entire life of a case from report to verdict. Serious crime dockets should carry shared ownership from inception. Prosecutors must be involved early, guiding investigations before defects become fatal. Investigators must be supported, not discarded.
Shared accountability means shared metrics: case survival rates, time-to-justice indicators, and mandatory joint audits of withdrawn cases. It means that failure triggers collective explanation, not institutional finger-pointing. It also means symmetry of consequence. Persistent non-engagement by prosecutors, or chronic detective overload unaddressed by leadership, must be recognised as systemic faults, not individual shortcomings.
Budgetary alignment is equally critical. Parliament cannot fund prosecution without funding investigation and expect coherence. Nor can it reward elite units while abandoning station-level policing. Justice systems fail not from lack of laws, but from misaligned priorities.
Fixing the Engine
The NPA’s 74% conviction rate is a Rolls-Royce statistic polished to perfection. But beneath it lies a rusted engine: collapsed detection, exhausted detectives, and communities forced to internalise violence as normal. Celebrating selective success while planning for widespread failure is not resilience; it is denial.
Behind every percentage point is a family waiting for answers and a detective staring at a mountain of unresolved harm. We cannot continue treating investigators as disposable inputs while lauding institutional outcomes detached from reality.
My final plea is for institutional sanity. Break the wall. Reunite investigation and prosecution around shared accountability. Reinvest in the human being behind the badge. Until we fix the engine room of justice, no amount of polishing will move this country forward. The time for boasting is over. The time for structural honesty has begun.
*Jacob Tseko Mofokeng is a professor of criminology at UNISA and a recipient of the UNESCO University of Connecticut award for his contribution to human rights and global solidarity.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media, the Independent on Saturday or UNISA.