Steve Biko inquest: Funding granted for family's legal team

Black Consciousness Movement founder Steve Bantu Biko died in police custody on September 12 1977, aged 30. The reopened inquest into his death is before the Gqeberha High Court

The state has secured funding for Steve Biko’s family’s legal team, clearing the way for the reopened inquest into his death in apartheid police custody to proceed nearly 50 years later.

The inquest could not get underway in the Gqeberha High Court on Tuesday, however, after the family’s newly appointed lawyers asked for more time to prepare.

Biko’s family had been without legal representation until Monday, when justice and constitutional development minister Mmamoloko Kubayi approved funding for the legal team.

This followed Legal Aid telling the court that Biko’s widow, Nontsikelelo, had failed its means test and that it had no funds to pay for her lawyer.

The court questioned whether such a strict means test was appropriate in a case of this nature.

With the legal team appointed less than 24 hours earlier, family lawyer Ngqiqo Sakhela applied for a postponement, saying they needed time to review the record and prepare for the proceedings.

He said the family was entitled to prepare properly, and that this meant working through a large volume of material, including the record of the original inquest and the TRC hearings.

Sakhela said parts of the record were in Afrikaans and would have to be translated at the family’s expense.

Documents from the 1977 inquest into Biko's death and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that followed are missing.

He said Adv Tembeka Ngcukaitobi SC had offered to represent the family for free before the inquest was postponed last year.

That offer fell away when Ngcukaitobi was appointed an acting judge of the Constitutional Court, leaving the family in what Sakhela called a "predicament".

The lawyers who had been lined up to work with Ngcukaitobi took on other matters while the funding issue dragged on, leaving the family to find a new legal team.

Sakhela also asked the court to subpoena former Security Branch operative Craig Williamson, who was not on the original witness list but told the Cradock Four inquest that he had kept Biko under surveillance.