South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has reportedly appointed a veteran advocate to lead a newly formed anti-graft unit, the President’s office said on Friday, reported Reuters.
Keeping to his election pledge to tackle corruption, Ramaphosa has appointed advocate Hermione Cronje to lead the Investigating Directorate, an arm of the National Director of Public Prosecutions, which is tasked with investigating serious, high-profile or complex corruption, for a term of five years.
The president created the directorate in March to focus on fraud and corruption, and cases emanating from the various commissions of inquiry. In effect the anti-corruption body replaces the Scorpions, a unit dismantled a decade ago.
In an official statement, Bulelwa Makeke, the head of communications of National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), said Cronje was an internally recognized anti-corruption expert.
“Advocate Cronje has the academic qualifications, wealth of knowledge and practical expertise required for this crucial position,” Makeke said. “She is an internationally recognised anti-corruption expert with extensive experience working with the NPA, where in 1998 she was part of establishing the Investigating Directorate into Serious Economic Offences and the Investigating Directorate into Organised Crime.”
Makeke said the Investigating Directorate will focus on issues including high-level corruption and allegations emerging from the Zondo, Nugent and Mpati commissions of inquiry.
President Ramaphosa took over the African National Congress party leadership from Jacob Zuma in 2017, who was forced to resign following a series of corruption scandals. The ANC party won last week’s parliamentary election, but its majority slipped to 57.5 percent, the lowest in 25 years, most probably due to the revelations of corruption.
This is the first time that ANC’s vote share has fallen below 60 percent in national elections since the country’s first free polls in 1994. The party won with 62.7 percent of the vote in 1994, 70 percent of the vote in 2004 and 62 percent in 2014.
