Resetting and renewing Idac won’t solve SA’s corruption crisis

A new, reformed Investigating Directorate Against Corruption needs to be a fully independent, single-entity anti-corruption body — outside executive control and potentially under Chapter 9 — to effectively combat grand corruption and restore the rule of law.

The “reset and renew” medicine Andy Mothibi, head of the National Prosecuting Authority since February 2026, has suggested for his institution’s imploded Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (Idac) is no cure for the multiple organised crime and serious corruption challenges facing South Africa.

Mothibi participated in Daily Maverick’s The Gathering 2026 panel of 11 September under the banner, Crime the Beloved Country”.

It is deeply inappropriate that a mere directorate within the NPA, which is what Idac is, should have responsibility for dealing with these twin scourges and the scoundrels involved.

Moreover, the creation of Idac in 2024 was carried out in defiance of binding rulings made by the Constitutional Court in the Glenister litigation.

The President ignored the timely warning to desist given by Accountability Now and proceeded to sign the Bill into law on the eve of losing the parliamentary majority that had ensured its passage.

What is needed urgently is an adequately independent anti-corruption body made up of specialists trained as such, standing alone in a single entity, with both structural and operational independence and possessing resources that are guaranteed in a secure working environment.

These attributes, laid down by the courts, have become known as the Stirs criteria.

Idac enjoys none of these attributes. It is constitutionally located and legislatively structured in such a way that no amount of “resetting and renewing” can possibly cure the inherent defects in the composition of Idac as a component of the NPA.

While Idac remains a directorate within the NPA, it is doomed to fail again and again, just as it did within 18 months of starting out in succession to the Investigating Directorate, a presidentially proclaimed stop-gap measure dating back to 2020.

This sorry fate for Idac was preordained because the whole of the NPA is subject to the minister of justice having “final responsibility over” it in terms of Section 179 of the Constitution. The minister also has the power to veto prosecution policy, and her director general is the accounting officer of the whole of the NPA, including Idac.

These features are not the material from which “an adequately independent body”, to use the court’s terminology from Glenister Three, can possibly emerge, irrespective of the amounts of resetting and renewing.

Attempting a “reset and renewal” of Idac without paying strict attention to the requirements of the law as laid down, in binding fashion, by the Constitutional Court, and summarised above, is doomed to fail.

It would, in expectation of victory, be akin to fitting an ancient VW Beetle with fat tyres and a throaty exhaust system before entering it in a flat race with the mint-condition Lambos, McLarens and Ferraris favoured by those gangsters currently under scrutiny by the Madlanga Commission.