Female judge president makes history
JUDGE Thoba Poyo-Dlwati has made history as the first female judge president of KwaZulu-Natal.
Poyo-Dlwati, 47, was recommended for the post by the Judicial Service Commission in October after an extensive interview process.
In December, President Cyril Ramaphosa selected her to lead the province. She assumed her role early this year.
Poyo-Dlwati is the second-born of 10 children. She was born and raised in Nkwenkwana village in eNgcobo in the Eastern Cape.
She said her father provided for his family by ploughing the land with a tractor he owned. He also owned a shop. Her dad died in 2020 and her mother, who was a housewife, still lives in the Eastern Cape.
After matriculating from Mount Arthur Girls’ High School, Poyo-Dlwati studied for her BProc degree at the University of Transkei (now Walter Sisulu University), which she completed in 1995.
In 1996, she relocated to KZN and a year later, she completed her postgraduate diploma in tax at UKZN’s Pietermaritzburg campus. This was when her legal career began.
“I did my articles with Jenny Budree & Associates for a year. I thereafter ceded my articles to Hoskins & Ngcobo Attorneys as I wanted to do conveyancing, and that is where I completed my articles,” she said.
In 1999, after serving her articles for two years Poyo Dlwati was admitted as an attorney and conveyancer.
“Hoskins was leaving the company for rugby and I became a partner in 2000. We changed the name to Ngcobo Poyo and Diedricks Attorneys.”
In addition to her duties as partner, Poyo-Dlwati was part of the Black Lawyers’ Association’s Pietermaritzburg branch, the KZN branch of the SA Women Lawyers’ Association, and the Southern African Development Community Lawyers’ Association.
In 2003, she became the first black female vice-president of the KZN Law Society and five years later, its president.
In 2012, she began serving as an acting judge in the KZN High Court until she joined the Bench as a judge in June, 2014.
Judges Matter, a civil society organisation, in an online bio of Poyo-Dlwati, listed several judgments that were significant in her career.
One included a 32-year-old mother of two minor children who shot and killed her boyfriend, and was subsequently convicted of murder. Balancing the interests of society with the interests of the minor children, the mother was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
The judgment was said to have been followed in subsequent cases and endorsed by Professor Stephan van der Merwe, a sentencing expert in the Criminal Justice Review.
From June 2020 until May 2021, Poyo-Dlwati served as an acting judge in the Supreme Court of Appeal.
In April last year, she was selected to act as deputy judge president in KZN, following the retirement of former Judge President Achmat Jappie.
“I was soon approached to make myself available for the position of judge president. I did and was subsequently interviewed by the JSC, and later recommended by the president.”
She said she had mixed feelings about her appointment.
“Apart from being the first female judge president in KZN, I am currently the only female judge president in the country. I am excited but also cautious. There are a lot of eyes on me to see if I will succeed or fail. But I have to succeed, for my sake and for all the women in South Africa.”
As judge president in KZN, PoyoDlwati oversees 27 judges and about 300 staff, and co-ordinates the judicial functioning of the magistrate’s courts.
She said it was a challenge to be a young black female in the judiciary.
“You are looked down on most of the time. So I made sure my work was beyond reproach. I worked hard, I focused and made sure I was always prepared for anything. I worked with the mindset that people can criticise me for anything but not my work.”
She said it was important for a judge president to have integrity, humility, empathy, a great work ethic and be firm where necessary. A judge president, she added, must be able to lead by example.
“You must also be able to deal with people at their own level.”
With regard to the backlog of cases in the criminal courts and the waiting time for trials, she said she would do her best to address them.
“Some of the backlogs were due to Covid-19. Our colleagues are trying their best to alleviate this. I’ve put in place committees to monitor the process of criminal and civil courts to be as efficient as possible.
“Also, the waiting time for trials in criminal matters is a problem. We are engaging with the director of public prosecutions to see how we can overcome this.”
Poyo-Dlwati said they were embracing technology in the courtroom and she was looking forward to adopting an online project called CaseLine which was first implemented in Gauteng.
“It enables you to deal with cases online and is paperless. That is what we are aiming to do. We’ve seen how it helped Gauteng during Covid-19.
“We tried in some instances to adopt this method but we had a challenge due to wi-fi. In Durban (high court), there is no standard wi-fi. In Pietermaritzburg (high court), it’s there but not stable. We need to sort this out.
“To some extent, CaseLine makes the work more efficient as you don’t have judges sitting physically in court. With the shortage of courtrooms, if some do it online, it opens space for the physical courts to continue. It is also cost-effective for the attorneys and clients who don’t have to travel all the way there.”
As the first female in her position, she hopes to run a diverse, inclusive and efficient KZN judiciary. To address diversity and inclusiveness, Poyo-Dlwati said a committee had been formed to deal with future acting appointments.