Africa-Press – Lesotho. SOMEONE should remind Advocate Shaun Abrahams, the South African lawyer hired to prosecute the so-called high profile cases, that he is neither the father nor the mother of law.
And he should demand a refund from whoever misinformed him that he is the best thing to happen after sliced bread. He is just one legally trained Homo Sapien among many.
Not even the sharpest tool in the shed. Muckraker has had it to the back teeth with Abrahams’ drama. He is either quitting, complaining, disappearing or the centre of some court drama.
Last week, we were told he was quitting one of his cases after being irritated by some “administrative issues”. One newspaper was quick to speculate that “administrative issues” were a code for delayed payments.
Every time he gets up to those high jinks journalists, especially the naïve and excitable pens without brains, he always remind us that there is a danger that the high profile cases will be delayed.
Nonsense! Those cases have not moved an inch in five years. No other delay can be more alarming than half a decade. And let’s not pretend that Abrahams is the alpha and omega of those cases.
He is just an employee who can be replaced before the next hoot of a 4+1 taxi. He should just pack his bags and vamoose if he doesn’t like his working conditions. There is nothing Abrahams does that cannot be done by a rookie lawyer.
He has been roaming our courts because some people at the Director of Public Prosecutions’ office either suffer from an inferiority complex or an incurable bout of self-loathing.
If they had any sense of self-respect and self-worth they would not have imported him for such a simple task as prosecuting murder suspects. The truth is that there is nothing earth-shattering about his CV anyway.
That is why our own defence lawyers here are showing him flames. Muckraker only remembers him for the unceremonious exit as the national director of public prosecutions at South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority.
This was after the High Court had ruled that he was inappropriately hired by Zuma, the disgraced president with a terrible habit of jumping in the pockets of rich but dubious characters.
Yet even if he had stayed on that job, there is no way Abrahams would have appointed a Mosotho lawyer to prosecute even in a pickpocket case in South Africa.
Such madness only happens in Lesotho where local lawyers are side-lined from lucrative appointments on the high-sounding but patently dishonest claim that they are too inexperienced to prosecute “high profile” cases.
When they start describing a case as “high profile” just know they want to sneak in a South African lawyer onto the job. It’s not about a sharp legal mind but money.
“High profile” means high legal fees and it pains them to give those fees to local lawyers.
They would rather give it to some overrated South African lawyer instead of ngoaneso. But the court system has a way of humbling overhyped wigs. Abrahams has been running around like a headless chicken at the Palace of Justice.
Local defence lawyers have buried him in a morass of applications and challenges that have put him on the banks of the Red Sea without a boat or any chance of divine intervention.
A foreign lawyer earning vulgar fees is being schooled by those paid pittances. But Abrahams doesn’t care because he keeps earning more and the DPP refuses to accept that he is out of his depth.
He probably tells friends he has discovered a gold mine in Lesotho. He only threatens to quit when the mine delays to produce his gold. Let no one fool you that Abrahams is some hotshot lawyer doing Lesotho a favour.
It’s not as if he has hundreds of clients waiting for him to finish his Lesotho cases before he takes theirs. No. Lesotho is his job and he is working it.
If he had anywhere more profitable to be he would have left a long time ago. But because Lesotho is where the butter is thicker he will stick around even when his master keeps changing the pay day.
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