Why is NPA protecting Mdluli?

IT’S hard not to laugh — except that it’s serious. Here is one team which is entitled to pick the referee. But it gets a bit rattled so it removes the first ref because he said the public could watch. Then, after nine days of match play (it’s a long game), it gets fed up with the second ref and wants him removed and substituted. It gets a third ref, just the man it wants.

The months roll by and the game carries on. Everyone is getting a bit exhausted. The final penalties are taken; everyone must return to hear how the points have been scored (the game is a mix between soccer and boxing). When they are back on the field, well scrubbed and dressed, the ref hands down the points tally. Two goals were disallowed. The remaining 13 all go to the visiting team. It has won 13-nil. The crowd goes wild; the team that’s lost is dumbfounded. It storms off the field.

Next day it calls a press conference. It isn’t going to take this lying down. The ref didn’t know his Arthur from Auntie Martha. It wants a replay. It wants to appeal against its own finding.

This sounds farcical, and it is. But this tale encapsulates the Glynnis Breytenbach saga. This deputy director of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has been suspended for more than a year. Now she has been vindicated by the NPA’s very own, carefully selected chairman of the disciplinary hearing. But it remains determined to prevent her from resuming her job as the authority’s principal serious commercial crime prosecutor.

Why? This is not about any commercial matter, which is what the NPA claims. Breytenbach says its action is designed to prevent her from pursuing former police crime intelligence head Richard Mdluli for fraud and various other alleged crimes. Is she right? It is certainly beginning to look as though she is.

If so, why? What is it that Mdluli, who is pretty sharp when it comes to spy tapes, is privy to that the rest of us don’t know? The NPA is on a war footing. It appears determined to shut Breytenbach down. This matter has every appearance of going the full distance — all the way to the Constitutional Court.

The NPA will be hoping Breytenbach can’t last the distance; if she does, a lot of people may find themselves looking at red cards.