Durban — The backlog in DNA results in KwaZulu-Natal that has caused delays in the justice system is far from over.
This was revealed by Parliament’s portfolio committee on police, during an oversight visit to a forensic lab in eManzimtoti on Wednesday. This lab was damaged by floods in 2017.
The leader of the delegation, Albert Nocks Seabi, said it might take 12 to 24 months for everything to be back to normal. He said a number of machines were still out of order despite being in the office, and this was a huge concern. He stated that KZN had five laboratories, and three of them were not functioning to their full capacity.
“The degrading state of the labs is also a concern, and the impact of this means we still need more time for the labs to function at full capacity.
“This has a direct impact on criminal investigations and the court process, whereby court cases will be stalled because there are no DNA evidence reports to be presented to the courts, which alone causes a backlog,” said Seabi.
The committee was going to write a full report and share it with Parliament next month, he said. Parliament would continue oversight visits to other laboratories, including one in the Eastern Cape, he added.
He said KZN did not have state-owned laboratory facilities.
“The current state of KZN facilities is still poor and the laboratories are housed in two leased buildings, which are located on a flood plain, which leads to the temporary closure of the buildings during flooding.
“The current buildings are leased by the Department of Public Works (DPW) on behalf of the SAPS. The King Crest building has been leased since 1996, and the current expiry date is March 31, 2023.
“As a result, since June 2022 chemistry cases are received and registered in Gauteng, and the actual cases are processed in the Western Cape by KZN analysts.
“The Nedbank building has been leased since 2010 and is currently on a month-to-month lease contract. Currently, biology cases are processed in the FSL KZN facility,” said Seabi.
Critical and vacant funded posts had yet to be filled, he said.
The site visits to KZN laboratories were held with the DPW for the proposed site, and the project was a work in progress, he said.
The proposed solution was to relocate the laboratory from the flood plain to a state-owned flood-free zone facility.
“Once we write a report and submit it to Parliament, it becomes a resolution of Parliament, and measures to cut off risks must be implemented,” said Seabi.
SAPS Head of Detective and Forensic Services, Lieutenant-General Khosi Senthumule, said the upcoming projects would create employment opportunities for forensic graduates.
“We are responsible for developing the training material, in line with our test methods and instruments used for DNA reports.
“As a result, we have developed competency metrics that will guide us to train and employ more than 40 forensic graduates as part of our two internal training programmes.
“It takes only six months to train … and we have multiple programmes within the scientific analysis division because training varies from the type of department, and some require a year,” said Senthumule.
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