The ousting of Busisiwe Mkhwebane as public protector is a tale of incompetence with a cautionary moral: those who use state institutions to fight factional battles do so at their peril.
The woman who infamously claimed that only God could remove her from office was humiliated on Monday when MPs voted overwhelmingly to do exactly that.
The ANC, or at least Luthuli House, appears to be tripping over itself to justify the way its MPs voted — under orders — in favour of kicking her out. Which is only to be expected, given that those who occupy the secretariat offices on the ninth floor of the party’s headquarters are avid social media watchers — and social media is where Mkhwebane’s supporters congregate.
Mkhwebane’s defence against impeachment, supported by the EFF, the UDM and even some inside the ANC, is that the campaign to oust her was driven by the ANC’s factional battles. Her sin, she maintains, was to make adverse findings against President Cyril Ramaphosa, the Reserve Bank, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and others.
However, this argument holds no water because not one of her reports on these matters withstood legal scrutiny. She was doomed by her own lethal cocktail of a biased agenda and a grasp of the law that was tenuous at best.
The EFF, for instance, in a statement on the vote in parliament this week said that her removal “was not based on performance” but was a “vindictive pursuit to remove her for investigating Ramaphosa”.
This is the same EFF that sang a different tune shortly after Mkhwebane took office in 2016, when Julius Malema described her as “useless”.
“We are looking at some way of rescuing that office,” Malema said then. “We just took a puppet from [the] Guptas’ kitchen and went to plant her there. She is proving without fail that she was sent there to destroy that office … That’s a rogue.”
The EFF even conceded that it agreed with the DA’s initial assessment of Mkhwebane that she was a spy. “If you’re not a spy — because now we believe you’re a spy — your actions just suggest that you are a spy. So take the DA to court,” Malema told Mkhwebane.
But Mkhwebane cannot necessarily claim the title of most-hated public protector. It would be a toss-up between her and Madonsela, who bore the brunt of the ruling party’s vitriol over her Nkandla report in 2014
Among her first priorities on taking office were to tune all the TVs on the premises to the Gupta-owned ANN7 and launch spurious criminal charges against her predecessor, Thuli Madonsela.
She even hired former South African Revenue Service (Sars) official Luther Lebelo as a senior adviser, despite the Nugent commission of inquiry into Sars having recommended disciplinary action against him.
Evidence before the Nugent inquiry dubbed Lebelo a “hitman” for disgraced Sars commissioner Tom Moyane. Fortunately, Lebelo has since resigned from the post Mkhwebane placed him in.
But Mkhwebane cannot necessarily claim the title of most-hated public protector. It would be a toss-up between her and Madonsela, who bore the brunt of the ruling party’s vitriol over her Nkandla report in 2014, “Secure in Comfort”, which made adverse findings about the state-sponsored upgrades to then president Jacob Zuma’s homestead.
The attacks against Madonsela were far worse than any directed at Mkhwebane — but she prevailed in the end because her reports could not be legally faulted.
She was dubbed a CIA spy by former deputy defence minister Kebby Maphatsoe. Buti Manamela, who is now deputy minister of higher education, laid into her over the Nkandla report, saying she was following a DA agenda. His current boss Blade Nzimande said “Secure in Comfort” was driven by “white people’s lies”. Police minister Bheki Cele said she should stop acting “like she is God”. The late ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte described her as a “populist” with a hidden agenda.
Zuma and his ministers tried to circumvent her Nkandla report with its damning findings and recommendations. Who can forget the then police minister Nkosinathi Nhleko’s “fire pool” narrative — the government had the audacity to take journalists to Nkandla to demonstrate their point.
But in a landmark case that reinforced the powers of the public protector, the courts forced Zuma’s administration to abide by Madonsela’s recommendations.
The rise and fall of Mkhwebane is a warning to the ANC and any other political party in power in future that using state organs for factional battles never ends well.
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