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Legalbrief   |   your legal news hub Monday 29 April 2024

Zuma reprieve for disgraced advocates

Beleaguered Deputy NPA head Nomgcobo Jiba and Commercial Crimes Unit head Lawrence Mrwebi, whom the courts have found unfit to practise as advocates, have had some good news at last, courtesy of President Jacob Zuma, notes Legalbrief. They are off the hook for now after Zuma, following representations from the pair, decided not to institute an inquiry into their fitness for office until the finalisation of the leave to appeal process. The two are approaching the SCA in a bid to have a High Court order that they be struck off the advocates’ roll overturned and will remain on special leave. In September 2016, Judge Francis Legodi ruled in favour of the General Council of the Bar of SA’s application that Jiba and Mrwebi be declared not fit and proper to be members of the Bar. ‘This is a very transparent method of avoiding the core of the problem,’ DA MP Glynnis Breytenbach said in statement on Friday, notes a News24 report. They had both behaved deplorably and brought the administration of justice and the NPA into disrepute, she said. ‘Yet the President prefers to sit it out and wait for the courts to do his job for him, just as he sat and waited for the General Council of the Bar to do his job for him,’ she said. Zuma should act immediately if he was serious about the efficacy of the country’s criminal justice system.