You're naughty, you know! I mean, they are doing those jobs and if they come and complain to Parliament about these things, it's really foolish of them. We must realise that it's not just them, it's the prosecutors as well. When prosecutors are employed, they don't necessarily employ people with five years' experience. They employ the people who have just come out of school.
In fact, if we want to complain we should complain about the prosecuting authority. In Gauteng, for example - Mr Shiceka would know this - in many of our regional courts we now have prosecutors with two years' experience. Because of the high turnover of prosecutors - there is a question about that coming later - we have that problem. So it's a general problem in our system. I mean, the Legal Aid Board mustn't try and make as if they're precious about this. That's number one.
Number two: It's the Legal Aid Board that's responsible for training their people, for keeping their people and for giving them the best opportunities. So, I say again: a legal system anywhere - I'll challenge anyone to go anywhere in the world - of course, stretches its money as much as it can to get as many lawyers as it can to assist people, but nowhere in the world does legal aid provide money for senior advocates or senior lawyers and upwards.
The system has a built-in problem in that it, of course, attracts a lot of young people into the system but we must remember that instead of having no legal representation at all, which is really bad news, at least they have a lawyer with, hopefully, the basic lawyers' skills who can at least help them with their cases.
But I say this again and I don't want to be defensive about it because there's nothing to be defensive about. We must try, by giving more money to the Legal Aid Board, by attracting a higher-quality lawyer to it, through training and through monitoring, to make sure that we provide the best quality services that we can. Remember, we're a young democracy. This Legal Aid Board, when we came into Parliament, anyone who is a lawyer will tell you, was a complete and utter shambles. They used to work on the sub judice system.
Judge Navsa, bless his heart, came in and cleaned that place up and now we have a completely different Legal Aid Board system that isn't based on sub judice anymore but on these legal aid clinics. These are new clinics; they're only a few years old, so we must give them a chance to develop. We must give them a chance to find their feet in our system.
They're already making a huge difference, as far as I'm concerned, in the sense that for the first time ever, in many courts now, when you have a prosecutor you also have a public defender. We never used to have that. The vast majority of our people used to go straight to prison without ever being represented by anyone.
So I accept the fact that in some instances there may be a lack of experience among these people but we must over time - we can't fix this in one day - build this institution because this is one institution we can be proud of. It shows an unqualified report and it has been turned around completely from what it was a few years ago to something that we really now look at as one of our really good institutions in the criminal justice system.