Opportunity for law graduates as NPA reinstates aspirant prosecutor project

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has announced the reinstatement of its aspirant prosecutor programme for 2025, offering opportunities for law graduates.

This development comes after the programme was suspended for 2024 due to government-wide budget cuts and fiscal constraints.

NPA's acting deputy director-general of corporate services, Bulelwa Makeke, expressed her enthusiasm about the programme's return. The programme has historically been a vital stepping stone for law graduates, with the 2022/23 intake seeing more than 1,000 graduates participating.

“In 2022/23, the NPA absorbed more than 1,000 law graduates into the programme. Due to the unplanned budget cuts, many of these aspirants could not be given contracts after completion of the programme,” Makeke said.

With recent improvements in the NPA’s budget, Makeke said the organisation was in a position to offer contracts to aspirants in the system, addressing vacancies in district court posts.

“The recent improvement in the NPA’s budget situation has allowed the organisation to offer contracts to many aspirants in the system, gradually filling the vacant district court posts that are being created through internal promotions,” Makeke explained. “For 2024, the NPA is starting to recruit a smaller intake of 80 aspirants for the year, but with a specific focus on NPA offices that have the capacity to train these colleagues and use them in priority high-need areas.

“The advertisement for the 2025 intake will be published on August 16 on the NPA and DPSA websites, as well as on the NPA social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter). Training is scheduled to start on March 1 2025.” 

Aspiring candidates are encouraged to keep an eye on the NPA’s channels for further details on the application process and programme specifics.

Earlier this month, Gauteng judge president Dunstan Mlambo expressed “deep” concern over the rising backlog of cases in the province. Mlambo said the lack of judicial capacity was a major contributing factor as the workload was too much for judges. He wants more people to be employed to solve the matter.

“You have a judiciary that is capacitated to deal with a certain workload. The workload we're dealing with is beyond our capacity. We don't have the judicial posts to manage the workload here. It's not the first time we've said our workload is increasing. We've been saying we need to create more judicial posts.

“We want to do our work, but we are dealing with unenviable workloads, and we need a quick response that addresses that in terms of the creation of additional judicial posts that will enable us to ensure that people don't wait too long to have their matters heard,” he said.

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