South Africa’s state capture database disaster

Anonymous sources have rubbished claims that investigators can’t access Zondo Commission evidence due to a technical problem with a database, alleging they are being actively blocked from seeing the information.

This is according to Rapport, which cited sources with insider knowledge of the work conducted by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and its specialist anti-corruption Investigating Directorate.

It follows a News24 report last week that evidence stored in the database had become inaccessible due to a “lack of maintenance”.

For two years, the NPA and its Investigating Directorate (ID) have been begging the Ministry of Justice for full access to the database.

However, the NPA said an expert who worked for the Zondo Commission told them the data was no longer accessible due to lack of maintenance.

According to Rapport’s report, the NPA and ID struggled to get their requests for evidence attended to even while the database was accessible.

Some requests were never handled, while others took weeks or months to get a result. Information that was eventually handed over was often filtered, one source told the paper.

Losing access to the data entirely raises questions about future prosecutions of individuals and institutions who were implicated in state capture.

The NPA said the justice ministry is now procuring another provider’s services to restart access. The ID has also sought the services of experts to help the NPA regain access to the evidence.

The Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector including Organs of State was a public inquiry established in January 2018 by former President Jacob Zuma.

It is better known as the Zondo Commission or State Capture Commission.

By December 2020, the commission said it had collected an exabyte (one billion gigabytes) of data.

It had issued 2,736 summons and interviewed 278 witnesses, generating 51,669 pages of recorded transcripts, and collected 159,109 pages of affidavits and other evidence exhibits.

The first part of the commission’s report was published on 4 January 2022, and the fifth and final part was published on 22 June 2022.

According to the commission’s website, the inquiry cost the taxpayer almost R1 billion — far more than any prior South African judicial inquiry.

This is not the first time this year that technical problems have been blamed for the loss of crucial evidence.

In February, the ANC said a broken laptop was to blame for failing to hand over records and documents relating to its cadre deployment committee meetings between 2012 and 2018.

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said the laptop of an official in the deputy secretary’s office had crashed in June and that he had deleted emails that likely contained data over the year.

“During 2023, my personal email, which I used for the deployment committee, was full,” the official said in an affidavit to the Democratic Alliance, which cried foul over the data loss.

“In an attempt to free up space, I sorted sent emails by size and deleted the majority of the big files. A number of emails which relate to the deployment committee were included.”

Regarding his crashed laptop, the official said he unsuccessfully tried to recover data from its hard drive on multiple occasions.

“Therefore, I do not have in my possession any other information for the period in question other than what appears in the affidavit to which this affidavit is annexed,” he said.

Some records from the ANC’s cadre deployment committee for between 2018 and 2021 were presented during the Zondo Commission.

The ANC said it could not find the committee minutes from December 2012 to December 2017, despite doing everything in its power to locate the data.

However, the ANC was eventually ordered to hand over what records and documents it could after a Promotion of Access to Information Act request from DA MP Leon Schreiber.

Schreiber now serves as South Africa’s Minister of Home Affairs.