The protector is too inept to put one over the public
Absa and the South African Reserve Bank are having none of it from Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane. Supplementary affidavits they each produced last week, in support of an application for judicial review of her report on the Absa lifeboat, make it clear they believe Mkhwebane has been captured.
Their views were formed after combing through the paperwork connected to her report. “To corrupt” is to twist something from its original purpose to one in conflict with it. The very name of her office provides its original purpose — to protect the public.
Instead, she appears to have conspired with the State Security Agency and the Presidency to try to undermine the central bank, an institution that is proving a difficult obstacle for the state-capture project.
Absa and the Reserve Bank each conclude that after considering the bizarre sequence of events that led to her completely bizarre report on the lifeboat, the public protector was acting for ulterior purposes. Mkhwebane met the Presidency’s legal advisers as well as the spy agency shortly before finalising her report. The meeting with the Presidency was not disclosed in her report, which purported to list all meetings she had attended.
Strangely, no recordings were made of those meetings, but handwritten notes taken by someone there, maybe the public protector herself, include the line, “how are they vulnerable”, in reference to the Bank.
The answer is not recorded, but the report thereafter argued that the Bank had been guilty of corruption over the lifeboat saga and that it served the interests of an elite cabal of bankers.
Its remedial action called for an amendment of the Constitution to change the mandate of the Bank to focus on the “socioeconomic wellbeing” of the country and for the Special Investigating Unit to reopen a probe into the lifeboat saga.
What makes it clear that these were not the genuine views of the public protector, arrived at after a fair and logical interrogation of the issues, is that these aspects of her report were only introduced subsequent to the meetings with the spies and the Presidency.
The draft report had not suggested anything like a constitutional amendment. And she had given no hint that she was considering such findings in her engagements with the Bank and Absa. So, the report seems to have been dramatically influenced by those two sources.
There is a kindergarten-level strategy at work. First, think about what the public might consider to be negative about the Bank. The answer seems to be that it can be perceived as elitist and focused on protecting the interests of bankers. Noise about the lifeboat report has been in the public domain for almost two decades, fanned by its original authors who have long hoped of a huge payoff.
With those two vulnerabilities identified, the report tried to focus attention on them to inflame public opinion. The same playbook has been used to great effect at the South African Revenue Service (SARS), the National Prosecuting Authority and the Treasury. Any means will do, including getting KPMG to write a report designed to target uncooperative individuals for removal, as happened at SARS.
In targeting the Bank, though, the conspirators may have bitten off more than they can chew. That is because there is too large a whiff of incompetence from the public protector. The spies must have grimaced when they saw how poor her report ended up being, and how blatant the signs of their interference were.
The report is so bad, it cannot be taken seriously. Mkhwebane met Stephen Goodson, a Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorist. His views made it into the report in wild references to the need to “nationalise” the currency and for the government itself to start issuing money. These are incoherent.
When the judicial reviews started, with the first one on her call for constitutional amendments, Mkhwebane wilted in the face of the interrogation of her report. She did not even put up a defence, agreeing to abide by the court’s decision.
We don’t yet know if she will defend herself in the second review, which the Absa and Reserve Bank affidavits are connected to. Her office put out a statement late last week, saying the meetings were legitimate. The least the security agency must have hoped is that she would stick by her story. So far, though, when challenged she’s shown nothing but willingness to have her version overturned.
There are serious questions the public protector should have to answer in court. Just what was discussed with the Presidency’s lawyers and the State Security Agency? Just how did she come to think that her proposed remedial action was reasonable? Was it motivated by her genuine mandate to protect the public from wrongdoing or was she twisted into quite the opposite, part of an effort to undermine an institution that was frustrating the Guptas’ access to the banking system?
Parliament has within its power the ability to fire the public protector with a two-thirds majority. That should be used only in extreme circumstances. But if the public protector cannot explain herself, we may well have such circumstances.