Union: Mpshe a buffoon

2008-11-19 17:33

Pretoria - National Director of Public Prosecutions Mokotedi Mpshe was making a buffoon of himself by creating the impression that ANC president Jacob Zuma's trial was nothing but political persecution, Popcru said on Wednesday.

In a statement, Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union spokesperson Benzai Ka-Soko said Mpshe was committing a wide range of blunders.

"Amongst a plethora of those blunders is his controversially suspicious recharging of Mr Jacob Zuma immediately after the latter was elevated to the podium of president of the ruling party."

Ka-Soko said this had created the impression that Zuma's trial was nothing but political persecution.

"He knows very well that the dissolution of the Directorate of Special Operations (The Scorpions) has now, surely and effectively, become a fait accompli," he said.

The parliamentary processes of the promulgation of the dissolution and subsequent establishment of the new unit were almost complete.

Ka-Soko said it was all buffoonery of Mpshe to use a recent conference of the African Prosecutors' Association at Emperors' Palace as a platform to launch his political tirade against the ruling party.

The reasons for the dissolution were clearly known and that fact that delegates from Botswana, Namibia, Malawi and Mozambique had expressed their concerns about it was immaterial, said the union.

This was because political conditions in South Africa were fundamentally different from those countries, said Ka-Soko.

"Mpshe knows very well that one of the problems with the DSO was its baggage of the old-order human resources whose activities were a serious concern to the majority of people in this country."

He also knew there were concerns that the unit was playing a partisan political role as manifested through the Browse Mole Report and its intelligence-gathering role, said Ka-Soko.

"Their notorious conduct of leaking information about individuals before formally charging them was and still is unprofessional and generally out of order to say the least."

He said the list of reasons for the dissolution of the Scorpions was endless and it was staunchly believed that the new police's Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation would manage to produce results in terms of crime prevention.

- SAPA