Mismanagement, not just money, is behind SA’s forensic failures

When accused of not doing your job properly, one of the best ways to divert attention is to claim you don’t have enough money to carry out your tasks… and that you therefore need buckets of it to turn things around.

That, effectively, is what the chair of the parliamentary portfolio committee on police, Ian Cameron, is accusing the management of the South African Police Service’s forensic science laboratory of doing.

The section has allowed the backlog in DNA tests to balloon to more than 140 000 which, it goes without saying, means many rapists and others guilty of physical crimes will go unpunished.

Laboratory service head major-general Tshilidzi Mulaudzi claims the way to address the problem is by spending huge amounts on establishing forensic labs in each of the country’s nine provinces.

Cameron says this is nonsense – because there is not that sort of money available and that the major cause for the failure of the forensic service to executive its mandate is incompetence.

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And while it is true that the service has been under-funded for years, Cameron is spot-on when he points out that much of the blame lies with system issues, including inefficiency and poor planning.

Cameron cited a report by the National Forensic Oversight and Ethics Board which revealed that about 80% of problems relate to infrastructure, among them the fact that critical forensic instruments have been non-operational since 2020, due to expired maintenance contracts.

That sort of managerial neglect rings a bell – because that is happening right across the country, from state-owned enterprises to municipalities, as infrastructure deteriorates or collapses because simple maintenance and replacement has not been done.

Even if you try to throw money at these problems, you’ll get nowhere until you replace the people causing them.