NPA boss flags ‘impossibly long’ challenges

There are numerous people who turned a blind eye or enabled the deterioration and destruction of state institutions, the head of the NPA’s investigative directorate has claimed ‘The challenge we face is that our list of potential accused is very long; it's actually impossibly long,’ said Hermione Cronje in an address at UCT this weekend. ‘In some institutions, it's hard to pick out people who can credibly give evidence in a criminal trial about what happened because they were either complicit or will struggle to answer questions about what they did to stop what was happening.’ A report on the News24 site notes that she said there were a few kingpins but many more mid-level government officials who participated in some way, including professionals such as lawyers and accountants who were ‘enablers’. She said the legacy of apartheid played a role because ‘policies were put in place as a result of social objectives to increase black representation in institutions and make them more representative of the country’.