Daily Dispatch

Mkhwebane unfit for office

THE attempt by the public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane to blame her senior legal counsel for her astonishing misadventure into the realm of economic policy setting fails to convince.

As one of our regular contributors to this page, Lolonga Tali points out below, Mkhwebane is surely no fool and it is difficult to believe she would innocently veer so badly off course that she would imagine herself to be entitled to prescribe changes to the country’s intricately woven Constitution and to fiscal policy.

Nonetheless, this is exactly what she did in concluding an investigation into whether Absa should pay back the R1-billion loaned to its previous owners by the SA Reserve Bank.

Apart from Mkhwebane’s bizarre leap being beyond her obvious boundary lines, there are many other bothersome aspects of this over-reach. For starters, her equally bizarre selection of the discredited CIEX report as the sole basis on which to make her findings.

Much has already been said about this, also the fact that Mkhwebane called for the Reserve Bank mandate to be altered without anybody having asked her to do so. And then she sent her findings, not to the applicant in the matter, Paul Hoffman, but to the leader of Black First Land First, Andile Mngxitama

But perhaps most disconcerting of all is the overall landscape in which Mkhwebane is operating – one where it is fairly common cause that the state capture project has as its final objective the acquisition of control of the Reserve Bank.

It was against this backdrop that Mkhwebane suddenly took it into her head to instruct parliament to redirect the Reserve Bank to change track from protecting the value of the rand to protecting “citizens’ socioeconomic wellbeing”. In other words to open the way to start printing money.

Interestingly her recommendation was in line with what Chris Malikane, the controversial adviser to Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba, has been vocally advocating ever since his appointment in April. He wants the Reserve Bank nationalised and a state bank created with the unrestrained ability to print money.

All of this has understandably given rise to speculation about whether Mkhwebane’s thunderbolt did actually come out the blue or whether there was a convergence of interests in some backroom or perhaps a shebeen to lead South Africa to a destination not dissimilar to that of Zimbabwe.

Now suddenly Mkhwebane does a U-turn and wants us to believe her senior counsel misled her into making a blunder even obvious to a layman.

The trouble here, is that even if Mkhwebane’s motives are impeccable she has shown herself to be inadequate for her task. And the mistake was so huge that it battered our limping currency.

Certainly Mkhwebane had gigantic shoes to fill when she became public protector. But rather than inspiring public confidence she has steadfastly raised suspicions about where her loyalties lie. Yesterday the EFF called on her to step down. This should be her only option. As things stand it seems the public is in need of protecting from Mkhwebane.