This is a job for Cyril and The Corruption Busters

Napoleon Bonaparte was an arrogant little chap. He famously said of his great enemy (the English, before they defeated and imprisoned him) that they were “une nation de boutiquiers” (a nation of shopkeepers). Having swiped the line from Adam Smith anyway, there would have been little chance of him recognising that while the English had their foibles, so did the French. France was, and still is, a nation of bureaucrats. There’s no piece of paper in France that doesn’t need a stamp licked on to it. In any of the Napoleonic bureaucracies, getting the most simple thing done can make you cry it takes so long.

This has been solved, typically, by the rise of an industry of managers who do the work and get the papers for you. They have echoes in the young men who loiter around our home affairs or licence offices offering to speed things up for a fee.

But the one thing the French, Italians and Spanish have that they can thank Napoleon for are criminal prosecution services that have the power to investigate what they prosecute.

It is a beautiful thing to watch in motion. Investigative Italian magistrates — not the police — tamed the Mafia and then brought down Silvio Berlusconi. Spanish magistrates jailed an intelligence minister behind a secret “dirty war” against ETA, the Basque separatists, and had the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet arrested in London in 1998.

Anyone with half a memory would recall that we had investigative prosecutors here in South Africa too, part of the NPA. They were called the Scorpions and they rained so much hell on corrupt politicians that Thabo Mbeki took fright and began the process of dissolving them. Jacob Zuma saw to it that the job was done when he became president in 2009.

We know now why Zuma was in a hurry. The NPA was stripped of its powers to investigate crimes and to prosecute them. They had angered too many powerful people. Yes, the Scorpions were often heavy-handed, descending on private homes at night, lights flashing, machine guns bristling, terrifying an often innocent and sleeping family.

But R200-billion smuggled out of the country by the Guptas later, who would not argue for the Scorpions to return in some form? I say some form but there really is only one form that matters. They should not be a part, in any way, of the police service. They should be part of the Justice Department and they should report to the head of the NPA and work with the police.

Bringing back a capacity for prosecutorial investigation must become a key metric by which we can measure the success or otherwise of ANC president and head of state-in-waiting Cyril Ramaphosa as a leader. He has some real weight behind him on the issue.

In 2011 then deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke ruled that the unit that replaced the Scorpions, the Hawks, was “insufficiently insulated from political interference”. As a result a few small regulatory changes have been made, but anyone who today still thinks the Hawks are sufficiently politically independent (as Justice Zak Yacoob and Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng did when they agreed with a dissenting judgment in the case at the time) needs their head read.

I know the Scorpions evoke in ANC leaders a terrible presentiment of Gerrie Nel jumping out of a Golf GTI in front of you, wearing an armoured vest and Ray-Bans, but it doesn’t have to be like that. DA policy is to bring some version of the Scorpions back. I’m surprised it isn’t a policy it shouts from the rooftops, but the DA has its own quiet way of not being pushy.

DA shadow justice minister Glynnis Breytenbach remembers the way prosecutors and police worked before the Scorpions; in the same rooms in the same building, prosecutors reporting to their bosses and the police to theirs but nonetheless perfectly aligned on developing prosecutions as investigations progressed. It can be done again.

What is required, of course, on the part of an incoming President Cyril, is political will. His life is fraught right now. But hell, Cyril, just imagine the opportunity. Imagine being able to raid our top law schools of their brightest talents, take young people flagging in legal corporate hierarchies but who’ve learnt a bit about tax and the way money flows and create something in government that young graduates scramble to join.

We know you take corruption seriously. Create a corruption-busting elite. You need to change no laws or regulations. Speak to Glynnis Breytenbach. She did it way before the Scorpions — and it worked.