Cape Town – President Thabo Mbeki moved decisively on Thursday to assuage the fears of many South Africans around the potential diminishing of the state's crime-fighting capacity, given that the ruling party has resolved to dissolve the specialised unit set up to fight organised crime, the Directorate of Special Operations, better known as the Scorpions.

Rather than simply dissolving the crime-fighting unit which falls under the purview of the Department of Justice, government has decided, said the president, to bring all the country's specialised investigators who focus on organised crime “under one roof”.

This will result in the creation of a larger, specialised unit dedicated to fighting organised that will have “more personnel and resources and capacity than currently exists in the Scorpions”.

The personnel who will comprise this new, super-unit will be drawn from both the Scorpions and the Organised Crime Unit of the South African Police Service, “and perhaps other institutions in our system of governance”, President Mbeki said.

And to assuage other concerns of the Scorpions's own specialised investigators, the President added that a transition to a new, larger unit will not impact on their salaries, which is known to have been a concern of these highly-trained investigators, who, because of their extensive training and location within the National Prosecuting Authority under the Department of Justice, have tended to earn higher salaries than those of the their nearest equivalents in the police.

The new unit, said the President, would be part of ongoing and “complex” reorganisation of the criminal justice system as a whole which was initiated earlier last year and “will affect a number of institutions that belong within the executive arm of government”.

However, he added, this reorganisation “will not entail any negative effect on the salaries and conditions of service of the current members of the DSO [Directorate of Special Operations - Scorpions”.

At the same time, the President moved swiftly to defend the integrity of the country's police service, adding that they will remain the “pre-eminent and unequalled formation in our country that confronts crime daily, including organised crime”.

“The suggestion,” said the President, “that the Police Service is nothing more than a junior and inferior formation relative to the DSO is absolutely wrong in the extreme.”

“The SAPS is made up of patriotic men and women who have, over the years, to date, demonstrated an unwavering commitment even to give their lives to guarantee the safety and security of all our citizens.”

As part of the reorganisation of the criminal justice system that will create a broad, cohesive, interlinked and cooperative front against crime, the government is to shortly table in Parliament a proposal for this complex reorganisation.

This proposal will cover more than the Scorpions, said President Mbeki, and will address “the important issue of the relationship between the reconstituted specialist institution to fight organised crime on one hand, and the intelligence establishment on the other, including the National Intelligence Agency, the National Communications Centre, the Financial Intelligence Centre and the South African Secret Service, as well as Customs”.

The criminal justice system will be revamped to “establish a seamless interconnection between investigations and arrests, prosecutions and sentencing and imprisonment and rehabilitation”, said the President, quoting here from the Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula.

President Mbeki added: “The Government has also taken the firm decision that all reforms we institute in this regard must be informed by the unwavering determination to ensure that we strengthen the capacity of our law enforcement agencies to intensify the war against organised crime, and under no circumstances to weaken it.”

As such, the specialist unit will continue to be guided and assisted by the skills that reside among members of the National Prosecuting Authority and the country's intelligence services, “ensuring that its operations are both prosecution- and intelligence-driven, to continue the history of the high conviction rate of the Scorpions”.

The government, he said, “has also reaffirmed its commitment to meet its international obligations in this regard, fully conscious of the fact that significant and highly dangerous elements of organised crime are, in fact, transnational”.

The new specialist institution to fight organised crime, he said, will also “serve as a referral body, enabling it to focus on the most complicated and the most pernicious instances of organised crime that will be referred to it by other formations in the criminal justice system”.

This, it will “play exactly the same role for which the Scorpions were established”. - BuaNews