Truth Delayed Is More Than Justice Delayed
The Khampepe ruling clears one legal obstacle. The harder question is what decades of delay have cost South Africa’s democratic project.
The Constitutional Court has dismissed the challenge brought by former presidents Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki against retired Justice Sisi Khampepe’s continued
role as chair of the TRC Cases Inquiry. Their challenge centred on whether Khampepe’s previous roles at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and National Prosecuting Authority created a reasonable apprehension of bias. The court found that the case advanced against her did not establish the basis required to remove her, allowing the commission to continue its work.
That resolves an important legal dispute. It does not resolve the history beneath it. The harder question is what prolonged uncertainty about apartheid-era crimes does to a constitutional democracy whose founding project included recognising the injustices of the past. When truth is delayed for long enough, the problem is no longer only whether justice has been postponed. It is whether the ability to establish the truth is itself being lost.
Truth was part of the bargain
South Africa’s transition did not treat truth as an incidental benefit of reconciliation. The TRC represented a difficult bargain between conventional prosecution and disclosure. Prosecution depended on evidence, witnesses and cases that could survive the criminal process. Disclosure could produce something a conviction alone could not always guarantee: an account of what happened, who was responsible and, in some cases, where the dead had been buried.
That distinction becomes important when the debate moves from legal theory to the experience of families. In Anchor Point, Nqaba Mabece argues that truth can mean knowing what happened to a loved one, finding remains, conducting a burial and recovering a measure of closure. The underlying bargain was therefore not simply amnesty in exchange for information. It recognised that knowledge itself could become part of redress.
That promise carries consequences when prosecutions or investigations remain unresolved decades later. The question is no longer confined to whether individual perpetrators can still be brought before a court. It becomes a question of whether the democratic state that followed apartheid has fulfilled the responsibilities created by the transition it inherited.
Time is not neutral
Delay can sound administrative. In historical accountability cases, it can materially change what remains possible. Witnesses die, memories deteriorate, records disappear and the number of people capable of answering questions shrinks. Mabece describes truth as increasingly dependent on an “ever decreasing number” of people who are still able to tell it.
The reopened Cradock Four inquest illustrates why that matters. In March 2026, proceedings resumed in the High Court in Gqeberha as families continued pursuing answers about the 1985 killings. eNCA reported that despite earlier findings pointing to state involvement, nobody had been criminally prosecuted for the killings. The passage of time, therefore, does more than make an old case older. It can steadily reduce the evidence, witnesses and institutional memory available to resolve it.
This is where delayed accountability starts affecting present-day democratic legitimacy. A constitutional state does not inherit responsibility for having created apartheid, but it does inherit institutions, records and obligations arising from what the previous state did. Its credibility is shaped partly by whether it demonstrates that institutional continuity will not mean continuity of silence or impunity.
Truth is also a question of dignity
The human stakes become clearest in Mabece’s reflection on Ahmed Timol. His formulation is stark: “At a minimum, in death, he is owed truth, which truth is dignity.”
That idea reaches beyond a criminal docket. A family that does not know how a relative died or where someone was buried does not experience the absence of truth as an abstract historical gap. It affects mourning, memory and the ability to place a life accurately inside both family history and the national record.
The record matters for another reason too. What a society establishes as true eventually shapes memorials, curricula, public institutions and the names it chooses to remember. Mabece argues that those whose names, identities and stories effectively disappeared with their bodies remain entitled to have those stories recovered. The work of historical accountability is therefore not only about punishing wrongdoing. It is also about preventing disappearance from becoming permanent.
Institutions inherit unfinished obligations
The Constitutional Court ruling means the immediate recusal dispute no longer prevents Khampepe from continuing as chair. eNCA reported that the Foundation for Human Rights welcomed the outcome as clearing the way for the commission to proceed, while the Zuma Foundation rejected claims that the former president was attempting to avoid appearing before it.
What happens next matters more than the procedural victory itself. The commission can investigate and establish facts, but prosecutors, police, justice officials and other state institutions ultimately determine what is done with the truth that emerges.
Mabece’s final argument is that forgiveness cannot require forgetting. He connects that proposition to the constitutional obligation of institutions to respect human dignity. That is what transforms the Khampepe Inquiry from an argument about the past into a test of the present.
A democracy can inherit unfinished history. It cannot indefinitely treat that history as somebody else’s responsibility. The longer truth remains buried, the harder it becomes to recover, and the greater the danger that delay itself becomes part of the injustice.
References
Anchor Point with Nqaba Mabece, episode published 01 September 2026.
Constitutional Court of South Africa. Zuma and Another v Chairperson of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations Regarding Efforts or Attempts Having Been Made to Stop the Investigation or Prosecution of Truth and Reconciliation Commission Cases and Others, CCT90/26, judgment delivered 31 August 2026. Constitutional Court judgment and media summary eNCA. Khampepe to continue as TRC inquiry chair, 31 August 2026. Read the eNCA report eNCA. Cradock Four inquest to resume in Gqeberha, 23 March 2026. Read the eNCA report