THAMI DICKSON

It would not be surprising if advocate Andrew Chauke, the suspended director of public prosecutions in Johannesburg, were to pursue legal action against former national director of public prosecutions Shamila Batohi for malicious prosecution and reputational damage.

This is if the Nkabinde inquiry clears him or fails to establish his unfitness to hold office. The inquiry is expected to submit its report to President Ramaphosa by the end of June.

Batohi alleged that Chauke had abused his office by deliberately mismanaging high-profile state capture and corruption cases to protect some politically connected individuals while targeting others.

Batohi also requested that the president establish a formal judicial inquiry to evaluate Chauke’s fitness to hold office, which he did.

At the inquiry Batohi failed to substantiate the allegations she made against Chauke with evidence. In fact, rather than fully cooperating with the very process she had asked for, she dramatically walked out in December 2025 during intense cross-examination by Chauke’s legal team.

For several months Batohi boycotted the inquiry, only to resurface recently with a request to submit written evidence instead, an approach that would help her to avoid cross-examination.

Her decision to abandon the inquiry midway and her inability to present the critical evidence needed to support her claims further harms her credibility

The chair of the inquiry, retired Constitutional Court justice Bess Nkabinde, correctly rejected her request, stressing that Batohi could not be allowed to sneak in a curated, untested, and self-serving narrative to the process without proper scrutiny.

This is particularly striking for a lawyer of her experience, especially a former head of the NPA. Suspending a senior prosecutor is no trivial matter, and it cannot and must not be driven by untested accusations.

It damages a hard-earned reputation, tarnishes credibility, disrupts a legal career built over decades, and casts a shadow of public suspicion over the individual.

It makes a mockery of justice when Batohi refuses to substantiate her allegations that led to Chauke’s suspension and her push for his dismissal on the grounds that he is unfit for office.

She needed to provide convincing evidence for those allegations. Her decision to abandon the inquiry midway and her inability to present the critical evidence needed to support her claims further harms her credibility.

In such circumstances, Chauke would be within his legal rights to sue her for malicious prosecution and reputational harm, given the significant damage her allegations may have caused him. She should not be allowed to abuse her authority to silence prosecutors who are simply carrying out their duties.

By refusing to fully cooperate with the inquiry to substantiate her allegations, Batohi is inadvertently inviting questions about the very basis upon which Ramaphosa made his decision

Perhaps most troubling about Batohi’s conduct is that it implicates President Ramaphosa’s decision to suspend Chauke and establish an inquiry into his fitness.

By refusing to fully cooperate with the inquiry to substantiate her allegations, Batohi is inadvertently inviting questions about the very basis upon which Ramaphosa made his decision.

The president would probably argue that he acted on Batohi’s representations in good faith, trusting that the allegations she presented to him were supported by credible evidence that would be ventilated by the inquiry.

When Batohi withdrew from substantiating her allegations at the commission she had asked the president to establish, it raised legitimate questions about whether the president’s executive decision to suspend Chauke and establish the Nkabinde commission of inquiry was, in fact, grounded in sufficiently sound and robust evidence.

This places Ramaphosa in an uneasy position. If the allegations underlying his decision are not properly tested because the accuser avoided scrutiny, the integrity of his decision-making and the entire Nkabinde judicial process are undermined.

Batohi’s conduct therefore does more than just harm her own credibility but also raises fears about the possibility that she may have misled the president in setting up the Nkabinde inquiry.