South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission asked the country to accept a hard trade. In some cases, truth would replace punishment. Amnesty would be granted, and in return, the public would get full disclosure.
But there was always a second half to that bargain.
Where amnesty wasn’t granted, the state was supposed to investigate and prosecute. That was the point. Amnesty could only be defensible if accountability still existed elsewhere.
In this episode of Both Sides, Randall Abrahams speaks to Dr Zaid Kimmie, Executive Director of the Foundation for Human Rights, about what happened when that second half failed to arrive.
Amnesty closed doors quickly
Kimmie stresses a detail that reshapes the entire story: amnesty was complete. Once granted, it blocked criminal prosecution and civil claims. Even if families disagreed, there was no alternative path. No second chance. No other court route.
That reality explains why the next part mattered so much. If the state did not prosecute the cases where amnesty was refused, then the country didn’t get truth and justice. It got truth and impunity.
The missing prosecutions
Kimmie describes how the expectation of swift prosecutions faded into drift. Years passed. Families watched cases stall. The longer the delay stretched, the more the suspicion hardened: this wasn’t only slow bureaucracy. It looked like the system had chosen not to act.
And that is where the story turns from frustration to alarm.
Attempts to expand immunity
By the mid to late 2000s, there were efforts to create alternative routes to immunity. These attempts signalled something important: there were powerful incentives for prosecutions not to proceed. Even when some routes were challenged, the deeper concern remained the same: why was the state trying to close cases instead of pursuing them?
The “behind closed doors” problem
Kimmie outlines speculation that a deal may have existed to avoid prosecutions. Not an agreement written in public record, but an understanding that prosecutions would not happen. The difficulty is also the danger: decisions like this are made behind closed doors, without public explanation, and without accountability.
When the decision is hidden, the public is left reading silence as evidence.
The commission’s real job: trace the instruction
The most compelling part of the episode is the shift from moral outrage to forensic questions. Kimmie points to a period where decisions not to prosecute appear to have been made, and to what a commission should be forced to trace.
Who made the decision?
How was it transmitted through the system?
How did it reach the police and the National Prosecuting Authority?
Who followed the instruction and what did they know?
If officials were told to stop pursuing cases and complied, Kimmie’s point is blunt: every step in that chain would be illegal. Not “unfortunate”. Not “messy”. Illegal.
The cliff edge
This episode ends on a tense hope: that people inside the system will speak. That officials who understood they were being told to look away will come forward. That political figures will explain what was done and why.
Because the question isn’t only about the past.
It’s about whether South Africa is willing to admit the moment justice stopped being delayed and started being denied. And whether the country is finally ready to name who made it happen.