Public protector asks Parliament for funds
• Mkhwebane tells MPs in Parliament R1.2bn is needed
Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane begged Parliament to provide her office with R1.2bn in funding on Thursday, when she also revealed she would be filing an answering affidavit in the state-capture case.
Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane begged Parliament to provide her office with R1.2bn in funding on Thursday and also revealed she would be filing an answering affidavit in the State of Capture case.
Mkhwebane, who was briefing MPs in the justice committee, ruled out donor funding.
She said the office’s current allocation of R263.3m was “a drop in the ocean” and it needed R1.2bn to carry out its mandate.
Her predecessor, Thuli Madonsela, had also bemoaned the lack of adequate funding and cited this as a stumbling block to wrapping up the State of Capture report on time.
“I know that it is a scary thought, but we will need at least R1bn just to stay afloat,” Mkhwebane told MPs.
Chief financial officer Kennedy Kaposa said the R1bn was a conservative amount, compared with the office of the public protector’s needs.
African Christian Democratic Party MP and committee Steve Swart was shocked at how much the office was allocated — weighed against the mounting legal fees, which run into the millions of rand it spent on defending its reports.
Mkhwebane said on the sidelines of the committee meeting that her affidavit in the case relating to the state-capture report had been compiled and would be filed soon.
The report, which was Madonsela’s last while serving in the office, was about the extent of the Gupta family’s influence over the government in terms of ministerial, directors-general and stateowned enterprise board appointments. President Jacob Zuma has approached the high court to review the remedial action ordered in the report.
Explaining the intricacies involved in compiling the affidavit, Mkhwebane said: “We cannot lodge certain documents because some information is confidential. To protect people, we had to get permission and say we will keep that record confidential and it will be lodged in a different format, so it is not an open record.”
She also said that her office had written to the Treasury and the Department of Social Development as part of its investigation into the grantspayment fiasco.
Her office would determine the scope of the investigations based on the responses it got, she said.
A key question the investigation would seek to answer was why it took the department so long to implement the Constitutional Court’s initial ruling.
During the committee meeting, EFF MP Nthako Matiase urged Mkhwebane to deal with leaks to the media.
Matiase was not opposed to giving the public protector’s office more funds, but said Mkhwebane needed to stabilise her office and show she was worthy of South Africans’ trust.
“If this R1bn is acceded to and approved, so be it. There are concerning issues related to staff morale. It should be concerning that, in the first 100 days, [the office has] ... been ravaged by resignations,” said Matiase.