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City Press reports today that deputy NDPP and Asset Forfeiture Unit Head Willie Hofmeyr was advised earlier this month by a text message from NDPP Menzi Simelane that his unit would cease to exist in its present form. This confirms (as we said on 14th April when Simelane presented his strategic plan for the NPA to Parliament) that he is playing snakes and ladders with the careers, contracts, terms and conditions of employment of the senior officers as well as the prosecuting personnel of the Authority. The game is apparently played by cell phone, too, a cynical new twist.

By fragmenting the functions of the Asset Forfeiture, Specialised Commercial Crimes and Priority Crime Litigation Units and placing them at provincial level, Simelane is neutralising powerful unit heads who have acted without political fear or favour. By proposing to move the NPA's administration to the Department of Justice, he is reducing the institutional independence of the NPA. (Its constitutionalised prosecutorial independence, contrary to what he reportedly said in a lecture at Wits last week, has been certified by the Constitutional Court.)

His proposals fly in the face of the NPA Act and the Presidential proclamations under which he insisted, when the DA challenged him in the Justice Committee, that the unit directors "are still there". But their proposed new role of trend spotting and stakeholder relations sounded to us, as we said, like reading the newspapers and going to lunch.

Meanwhile, the provincial Attorneys General to whom the fragmented unit staff now report have no reasons to feel too secure should they act fearlessly and without favour. When defending himself against our charge that he had been summarily demoting senior prosecutors like Advocates Baloyi, Nengovela and Lamprecht, the NDPP insisted that the job of everyone in the NPA is to prosecute, and that if he sent the Western Cape DPP Rodney de Kock (sitting near him in the portfolio committee meeting) to prosecute in the Wynberg Magistrates Court, he would be fully within his rights.

We will ask the Justice Minister Jeff Radebe this week where he stands on these wholesale inroads on prosecutorial excellence, independence, labour rights and what looks to us like the systematic ruination of an authority built up by the predecessor who Simelane purged from his post, Adv Vusi Pikoli.