Given the weight of public interest after the brutal murder of 14-year-old Likhona Fose, it is incomprehensible that seven weeks after the arrest of Mduduzi Mnisi, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has dropped the charges.
On Wednesday, the NPA announced that evidence has since emerged that Mnisi, initially said to have been the last person to be seen with Fose, was in fact not.
Mnisi was charged with Fose’s murder after her body was discovered in open veld in Durban Deep on June 1. But during his bail application, Mnisi said he did not know Fose, and raised an alibi that his phone records would prove he was in Daveyton on May 31, the day she the teen went missing.
After giving instructions to the investigating officer to probe Mnisi’s alibi, including taking statements from witnesses and checking that his phone signal was synced to the Daveyton cellphone tower, the NPA confirmed Mnisi could not have been the last person to be seen with Fose.
The decision to confirm such crucial information, and obtain further statements from witnesses after Mnisi’s bail application, raises serious concerns about prosecutorial processes and the quality of investigations., The timing of the decision is also of grave concern, given that it has taken seven weeks for the NPA to arrive at this point.
For Fose’s family, it comes as a crushing blow in their pursuit of justice for their loved one, whose murderer is roaming the streets without consequences. How the NPA and the investigator arrived at the point of charging Mnisi remains a mystery.
The first problem is that the prosecution appears to have relied on a single source for its claim that Mnisi was the last person to be seen with Fose. Even though Fose’s body was found mutilated, raising suspicions that she could have been killed for muti, the state appears to have failed to ascertain this in its pursuit of Mnisi.
It suggests the state rushed into placing the matter before court, which has now backfired at a huge cost of emotional trauma for Fose’s family. The failure to arrest the real perpetrator of this heinous crime has other worrying implications, too. It has allowed time for evidence that could help solve the crime to vanish, and for the killer or killers to roam the streets, possibly to commit other murders.
These kinds of failures will further deepen the crisis of credibility facing our criminal justice system and continue to erode public trust in it. Fose’s case underscores the urgent need for NPA to get its house in order.
SowetanLIVE
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