Errol Horwitz, Cape Town
Madonsela set high standards for successor Public Protectors to emulate. One cannot say the same for Mkhwebane, other than the fact that both she and Madonsela are disliked: Madonsela for the wrong reasons, and Mkhwebane for the right ones.
The new Public Protector said recently in a radio interview: “I think I know I won’t be pleasing everyone, and I’m just trying to do my job.”
Therein lies the problem: She’s not doing her job, because she appears to have no understanding of the duties and responsibilities of (what being) a public protector (entails). What is it that Mkhwebane does not comprehend? Or is it as a growing number of political analysts assert, that she knows what she’s doing by “playing to a well-rehearsed narrative” and in doing so, exposing her “allegiance” by giving her report to the clumsily-titled Black First Land First movement, the paid surrogates of the Gupta family… the “family’s convenient mouthpiece”.
Her probe of the Absa saga was simply a pretext to targeting the Reserve Bank, the last remaining independent state institution, for capture.
Whatever influence the Gupta family exercises over her decisions, she really demonstrated bad judgement in seeking out Stephen Goodson, a Holocaust denier and an ardent admirer of Hitler, to mentor her in connection with her probe.
According to Mkhwebane’s resumé, she graduated with an LLB from the University of the North. Even though rated somewhere near the bottom of the academic totem pole, it must have provided her with some iota of acumen to at least understand the limits of her office.
Nonetheless, she issued a bombshell report, violative of the Public Protector Act, littered with incoherent findings and sweeping overreach. The backlash was tellingly immediate to which she sheepishly claimed that her recommendations were merely “suggestions”.
Not so, according to the Constitutional Court. I can only conclude that her understanding of contract law, and/or interpretation of statutes, were not her strong points at law school.
There are those who contend that her actions are the product of incompetence – undoubtedly so – but also at play is the spectre of outside forces acting in concert and pulling her strings.
