The machinery meant to deliver justice for apartheid-era crimes has, in the view of many of the families it was built to serve, failed to function for years. The question of who owns that failure returned to the centre of public scrutiny this week when former president Thabo Mbeki testified before the judicial commission of inquiry into the handling of Truth and Reconciliation Commission cases.
Mbeki, appearing on Monday in testimony that had been long awaited, told the commission that the National Prosecuting Authority must take full responsibility for its failure to prosecute the many cases that have remained unresolved for years. He denied any political interference in TRC prosecutions, framing the breakdown as an operational matter that sits squarely with the prosecuting authority rather than with the executive.
The commission itself was established last May in response to an application by families and victims of apartheid-era crimes filed in the Gauteng Division of the High Court. It is chaired by retired Constitutional Court Justice Sisi Khampepe, assisted by retired Northern Cape Judge President Frans Diale Kgomo and Advocate Andrea Gabriel SC. Its brief goes to the heart of a delivery question: why the cases identified by the Tutu-era TRC for investigation and prosecution were never carried through, and whether that outcome was the product of institutional failure or political direction.
Mbeki addressed that question directly, rejecting the account of how the post-transition arrangement came to be. He described the ANC-National Party power-sharing arrangement, a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, as one element of a broader settlement aimed at political stability, national unity and reconciliation. But he insisted that the arrangement did not absolve the NPA of its mandate to investigate and prosecute apartheid agents who killed scores of activists before 1994.
He also rejected claims by the late Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who led the earlier TRC, and by the Helen Suzman Foundation, that general amnesty for perpetrators was shrouded in secrecy. In his testimony, Mbeki pointed to a 2003 parliamentary speech as evidence that the division of responsibilities had been made explicit at the time. “I made it clear in my speech to Parliament on 15 April 2003, that we left it to the NDPP (National Director of Public Prosecutions), supported by our intelligence agencies, to address the first category of participants, in line with the law,” he said. He added that neither the first nor the second category of participants included persons who had unsuccessfully applied to the TRC for amnesty and whose cases had been referred to the NPA for prosecution. “That remained and still remains the business of the NPA to prosecute,” he said.
It was on that basis that he dismissed the suggestion that political interference had been baked into the process. “For this reason, it is difficult to understand an allegation about the ‘seeds of political interference’ with the TRC cases referred to the NPA for prosecution, were laid in the deliberations that led to the strategies reflected in my speech to Parliament on 15 April 2003,” he told the commission. “I deny the allegations.” Mbeki further denied having held secret meetings with former president FW de Klerk, members of the SA Defence Force and SA Police to discuss granting a blanket amnesty to officers implicated in apartheid atrocities.
Meanwhile, the families driving the litigation, and the commission that grew out of it, measure the gap between promise and delivery in specific human terms. They include the relatives of the Cradock Four, the Eastern Cape anti-apartheid activists Matthew Goniwe, Sicelo Mhlauli, Fort Calata and Sparrow Mkonto, who were slain before the democratic transition. The families seek declaratory orders and constitutional damages for the NPA’s failure to investigate or prosecute the cases identified by the Tutu-era TRC. Lukhanyo Calata, son of Fort Calata, has asserted that the government and successive ANC-led administrations, including Mbeki’s own, failed TRC victims and families, an assertion Mbeki challenged in his testimony.
The testimony also revisited the record of what the state itself had documented decades ago. The commission was played an ANC Radio Freedom audio broadcast from 1985, in which Mbeki, addressing South Africa from exile on the eve of the mass political funeral of the Cradock Four, spoke under the highest state repression of PW Botha’s state of emergency. “Compatriots, tomorrow at Cradock in the Eastern Cape, we shall be burying our leaders,” he said in the broadcast, adding that their names stood “at the head of the list of heroic martyrs whom the enemy has murdered in cold blood, as part of its continuing war of repression against the people.”
In that address, Mbeki described the enemy’s methods in terms that anticipated the unresolved questions now before the commission. “The enemy has launched a new kind of war against us. It is kidnapping, murdering our leaders and activists in secret,” he said, describing how agents enticed activists “into dark corners, far away from the eyes of the people and there it murders and mutilates.” He urged the oppressed to “keep our eyes on the enemy” and vowed that the movement would not mourn but would “pierce the murderer’s heart in honour of your memory.”
Four decades on, the families of those murdered in that secret war are still waiting for prosecutions that were identified, referred and never carried out. The commission, chaired by Khampepe, must now determine whether that failure lies with the prosecuting authority alone, as Mbeki maintains, or with the political principals who oversaw it. For the families, the answer will determine whether accountability for the delivery failure itself finally becomes a reality. Further reporting on the commission’s proceedings is available at https://mg.co.za/news/south-africa/2026-10-19-the-npa-should-take-full-responsibility-for-failing-trc-victims-and-families/