Malusi Gigaba’s pants on fire
PRESSURE from civil society organisations and opposition parties mounted yesterday for the president to sack Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba.
Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane announced she had found he had lied under oath and had violated the Constitution. She called on Cyril Ramaphosa to act within a fortnight.
The Council for the Advancement of SA Constitution (Casac) said Gigaba’s denial that he allowed Fireblade Aviation to operate an immigration terminal at OR Tambo International Airport highlighted Parliament’s inability to hold public representatives to account.
Casac executive secretary Lawson Naidoo urged Ramaphosa to remove Gigaba from his cabinet. “We should not have waited for the Public Protector to resolve the matter,” Naidoo said.
DA chief whip John Steenhuisen, who had lodged the complaint with Mkhwebane, welcomed the ruling that Ramaphosa take action within 14 days.
“We would like to remind the president that the findings of the Public Protector are binding unless challenged in court, and encourage him to finally put an end to Gigaba’s scandal-prone and frequently dishonest tenure,” he said.
The ruling came a day after the Oppenheimers appeared before the home affairs portfolio committee in Parliament and accused Gigaba of lying in the matter.
In December last year, the High Court in Pretoria found Gigaba had approved a licence for Fireblade Aviation and its directors, billionaire Nicky Oppenheimer and former North Cape premier Manne Dipico, to operate at OR Tambo International on January 28, 2016. Gigaba, early this year, appealed the ruling but the judge came to the same conclusion that the “minister’s denial should be rejected on the papers… and that the rejection of the minister’s version must carry with it the conclusion the minister deliberately told untruths under oath”.
In March, the Constitutional Court rejected his application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeal.
In her ruling, Mkhwebane said Gigaba made a failed attempt to persuade her to ignore the court’s ruling.
Mkhwebane said in April that Gigaba requested she “consider a legal opinion premised on the understanding that the courts ‘misconstrued’ the evidence and that this ‘misdirection’ was perpetuated in the Supreme Court of Appeal”.
She said she rejected Gigaba’s version and told him that she was bound by the decision made by any court of law and “until a higher judicial authority proved otherwise”.