Picture this: a powerful anti-corruption chief is appointed quietly, without public process, without explanation, without so much as a press release that tells you why this particular person deserves this particular job. Three years later, she is the subject of damning testimony before a judicial commission, accused of manipulating case management and investigation processes for unlawful ends. The institution she led — meant to be the country’s sharpest weapon against high-level corruption — is now itself under the microscope. This is not fiction. This is South Africa in 2025, and if you think it cannot happen here, you have not been paying attention.
The story of the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (IDAC) and its disgraced former head, Andrea Johnson, is ostensibly a South African story. But strip away the names and the geography, and what you find underneath is a universal blueprint for institutional collapse — one that any young Kenyan who has watched the EACC, the DPP’s office, or the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission cycle through leadership with no accountability should recognise immediately. The mechanics are identical: opaque appointments, no published criteria, no public scrutiny, and the inevitable result — an institution captured before it even gets started.
In South Africa, the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, known as Casac, is now pushing hard for structural reform of the National Prosecuting Authority, the body that sits above IDAC. Their demands are not radical — they are simply the minimum that any functioning democracy should require. They want fixed term limits of seven years for senior prosecution leaders, so that no one turns a public office into a personal fiefdom. They want published job criteria that go beyond the vague, toothless “fit and proper” standard currently on the books. And they want genuinely transparent appointment processes — open calls for nominations, public scrutiny of shortlisted candidates, public interviews, and a president who must explain, on record, why a specific person was chosen. Not announce. Explain. The difference matters enormously.
What makes the South African situation so instructive — and so sobering — is the data behind the dysfunction. Since 1998, only one National Prosecuting Authority boss has completed a full term. One. The State Security Agency has operated for nearly three years without a permanently appointed director-general. The only post-apartheid police commissioner to serve out his full term left office in January 2000. Meanwhile, IDAC itself has filled only 146 of its 212 posts, a vacancy rate of 31%, and the Hawks — South Africa’s equivalent of a serious crimes unit — had 3,000 vacant specialist forensic and auditing posts when the Financial Action Task Force reviewed the country in 2023, a review that ended with South Africa’s humiliating greylisting. These are not coincidences. They are the predictable consequences of treating powerful public institutions as patronage opportunities rather than constitutional responsibilities.
The argument Casac is making — that weak, opaque appointment processes are a recurring source of institutional instability — is one that deserves to land hard in Nairobi, not just Pretoria. Kenya has its own version of this story, repeated across administrations with depressing consistency: institutions whose mandates look strong on paper but whose leadership is selected through processes so murky that independence becomes structurally impossible from day one. When the person sitting at the top of an anti-corruption body owes their position to a quiet phone call rather than a competitive, public process, the conflict of interest is baked into the institution before a single case is opened. Vetting, as Casac bluntly notes, is no silver bullet. Lifestyle audits that remain confidential change nothing. Johnson herself was vetted — she had served as deputy director of public prosecutions, as a national organised crime coordinator, and in the Scorpions before their disbandment. The vetting did not save the institution.
What can actually work — what the evidence from functioning democracies consistently points toward — is structural: non-renewable fixed terms that remove the incentive to please the appointing authority, transparent processes that force accountability into the open, and criteria specific enough to each office that “fit and proper” cannot be stretched to mean whatever is politically convenient. These are not bureaucratic niceties. They are the architecture of institutions that can withstand political pressure, because their leaders do not owe their positions to political pressure in the first place. Rebranding IDAC, as South African officials are currently discussing, changes nothing if the underlying appointment logic remains the same. A new name on a captured institution is still a captured institution.
The stakes here are personal, even if they do not always feel that way. Every time a corruption case collapses because the institution pursuing it lacks credibility, the person who loses is not an abstract citizen — it is the nurse whose hospital has no supplies because procurement was looted, the student whose bursary disappeared into someone’s private account, the small business owner crushed by a tender process rigged from the start. Institutional integrity is not a governance abstraction. It is the difference between a country that works and one that extracts. South Africa is trying, belatedly and imperfectly, to learn this lesson. The question worth sitting with — the one that should make every politically engaged young Kenyan genuinely uncomfortable — is whether we are willing to demand the same reckoning before we reach the same breaking point.
