The chilling death of a top prosecutor

And the potential (re-)capture of the National Prosecuting Authority

There is not a lot that unnerves me, which is why I have had little hesitation in writing about concerns with connections between powerful people (like former ANC president Kgalema Motlanthe) and powerful interests (the ‘former’ UK and US military and intelligence officers on the board of the Brenthurst Foundation). Today, however, I saw a newspaper headline that sent a chill down my spine. It was about the sudden death of deputy national director of public prosecutions Rodney De Kock.

The fact that De Kock reportedly died of cancer would be enough to make most readers write this off as an unfortunate natural event. I am not so sure…

The reason is that one of the articles I had been drafting for publication later in 2025 was about the potential looming capture of South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA). In my draft analysis, De Kock was a potential obstacle to a plan to appoint another deputy, Anton Du Plessis, as the next National Director of Public Prosecutions.

Now that De Kock is dead, a major obstacle to those ambitions is gone. The timing appears very serendipitous for those interests. Too serendipitous for my liking. So here is my analysis of potential NPA capture, now placed alongside the significance of De Kock’s death.

Laying the ground for NPA capture

I had almost completely taken my eye off the NPA, only noticing how slow and/or unsuccessful it had been in prosecuting cases relating to the State Capture era - despite some bold promises to the contrary.

But in October 2024 a series of articles caught my eye: they were about a deputy national director of public prosecutions, Anton Du Plessis, being denied his top secret security clearance by the State Security Agency. According to the reports this was solely due to his dual citizenship - as a result of having acquired British citizenship in 2018. A range of newspaper publications - News24, City Press, Daily Maverick and Mail and Guardian - were keen to downplay the issue and frame Du Plessis as the inevitable successor to incumbent NDPP Shamila Batohi.

This immediately aroused my suspicion. The once-progressive Mail and Guardian is now funded by CIA cut-out organisation the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). News24 is the jewel in the Naspers stable, run by the son of a former apartheid military intelligence operative and the daughter of an askari (traitor) who betrayed the anti-apartheid movement. It regularly reveals its bias in favour of US imperialism and has taken funding from a right-wing German foundation and collaborated with the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) that was founded and is still chaired by ‘former’ apartheid intelligence and military operative Jakkie Cilliers. [The ISS reappears below] Daily Maverick began its life as a right-wing lads magazine, has an Eastern European who dislikes communism as its founder and editor, and is the kind of publication that had a ‘former’ US diplomat as its foreign policy editor; it has received funding from the Open Society Foundation and Michiel Le Roux’s Millenium Trust, among other possibly undeclared sources.

Slightly over a month later the investigative journalism outfit amaBhungane published an entire video report - the first its ever done - on the recent failures of the NPA. amaBhungane receives extensive funding from Michiel Le Roux via the Millenium Trust and the Open Society Foundation (directly and through the ‘Constitutionalism Fund’). It showed its cards most blatantly in relation to geopolitical interests when it began lobbying on on key national sovereignty issues like gas exploration and extraction in 2022.¹

The amaBhungane report features a short role for Du Plessis but no blame is laid at his door. The commonalities among the individuals featured in the amaBhungane report is itself a red flag. One is Glynnis Breytenbach, a DA politician and former NPA prosecutor who was reportedly once spotted in the company of a Zionist South African billionaire Nathan Kirsch and a former head of Israel’s domestic security agency, but now sits on the committee that selects South Africa’s judges (the JSC). Others are: Hermione Cronje (early studies in partnership with Georgetown); Sam Sole (amaBhungane - funding as above); and Karyn Maughan (an initially well-intentioned journalist who has accumulated blatant biases in favour of the kinds of interests promoted by the above funders and institutions).²

I’m sure you get the picture. When all these publications and journalists lobby in favour of a candidate, I would suggest it is quite reasonable to assume that person is likely to represent the same interests as the ones they were founded and funded by. But we need not rely only on that kind of indirect, suggestive evidence: aspects of Du Plessis’s background raise red flags on their own.

Anton Du Plessis: Jakkie Cilliers’ successor at the ISS

Aside from the above, two obvious red flags in public information about Du Plessis’s background are:³

1. Executive Director of the Institute for Security Studies

2. Specialised in counter-terrorism working for international institutions.

The second one is a concern just because it would have meant that Du Plessis would have been a ‘person of interest’ for foreign intelligence agencies. And that comes with higher risk of being compromised.

The first is, in my view, the much bigger concern. I have written before about the ISS:

As I noted there, the ISS was established by apartheid military and intelligence operative Jakkie Cilliers - who is still its chairperson. Cilliers was the executive director and presumably would have selected Du Plessis to succeed him. While at ISS Du Plessis collaborated with a man by the name of Martin Schonteich. It turns out that Schonteich was an advisor to current NDPP Shamila Batohi, but left before getting his security clearance - at which point it was discovered that he was a US citizen. At the time Schonteich was heading up a programme of work for the Open Society Foundation. Before that he himself had worked for the ISS for four years in the 1990s. His background prior to arriving in South African appears unclear.

All of this, frankly, makes one very concerned that a powerful set of interests have already gotten their claws into the NPA and are set to take complete control by having their favoured candidate appointed as NDPP. After the era of State Capture in which Jacob Zuma appointed individuals to serve his interests, it seems the country could be lurching from capture by one group to capture by another.

Candidates for succession

The thrust of some of the media reports in October 2024 was that Du Plessis was a shoe-in for the position of NDPP because he was the only one of the institution’s four top officials who was not due to reach retirement age in the next year.

Even on its own this doesn’t follow, because there is always the possibility of other strong candidates from inside and outside the institution. There is no inevitable transition from Deputy to National Director.

But even putting that aside, this argument was based on an incomplete reading of the NPA Act. It is true that the Act states that the NDPP and DDPPs are supposed to retire at 65:

However, the Act gives the President the discretion to appoint individuals in either position beyond the age of 65 if they agree to this and are in good health:

In the face of controversy about Du Plessis’s background and clearance status, this would have placed De Kock - with his uninterrupted experience in the prosecuting authority - as a frontrunner for a compromise candidate for two years.

There is no information in the public domain about whether this possibility had been considered or whether De Kock would have expressed interest in it. Yet it seems plausible that someone as experienced as De Kock was, might well think that he would be a much more appropriate appointment to head the organisation than someone like Du Plessis with less experience. And it would be hard to disagree.

The chilling death of Rodney De Kock

If this analysis is correct, De Kock could have been an obstacle to making Du Plessis an uncontested candidate for the position. Contrary to claims by the media outlets cited above, it was not inevitable that the NDPP or the deputies had to immediately retire.

It is for this reason that I found De Kock’s sudden death, reported yesterday, very disturbing. Reportedly the cancer he had was ‘an aggressive form of brain cancer diagnosed in December 2024’. So it would likely have begun around the time, or shortly after, the controversy about Du Plessis’s security clearance and candidacy emerged. That timing itself adds signficantly to such concerns.

It would be reassuring if it turned out that De Kock had no interest in the top post and that the possibility of him being appointed had never been considered. That may never be known publicly, one way or the other.

Either way, whether or not there was more behind De Kock’s death than ‘natural causes’, it remains the case that there are many reasons to be seriously concerned about the future of the National Prosecuting Authority. With the intelligence agencies in partial disarray - including with the minister who I have argued may be deliberately undermining them now potentially facing corruption charges - the country again looks defenceless against foreign intereference in these key processes and appointments. Just as it did before the 2024 elections.

My own view is that Du Plessis’s background with the ISS should disqualify him from the top post. In fact, I would go further and say that no ISS employee should ever be employed in a public institution until there is a thorough investigation of the context and motive for the establishment of the ISS in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Which in turn would require a thorough, independent assessment of Jakkie Cilliers’ history and motives. Clearly there are others who think otherwise. But these are the kinds of issues that have simply been left unaddressed in the post-apartheid era. And the vast majority of the country are left completely unaware thanks to very partisan media reporting.

And of course if Du Plessis is appointed, it is highly unlikely any of the ‘civil society’ and ‘media’ organisations cited above will be in any way impartial in assessing his performance or prosecutorial decisions.

This is another indication that there may be very dark times ahead for South Africa.

1. My co-author on energy geopolitics and I - despite having once had a positive enough view of amaBhungane to make small donations to it - clashed with the head of amaB, Sam Sole, on this issue on social media at the time.

2. Some might add that the only black South African featured in the report is framed negatively. I think this is significant, but of course there are a number of black South Africans coopted by these interests - some of whom I have already written about - so the presence or absence is not definitive on its own.

3. I should note that there is information I would have been interested in but could not find, like what he was doing before he became a prosecutor in 1997.