Zuma’s interpretation of what public protector said

“I am telling the people of South Africa I never lied,” President Jacob Zuma emphatically told Parliament on Tuesday. He had, in fact, just misrepresented a finding by the public protector.

Neither the public protector nor the Constitutional Court had ever found that he had lied to Parliament, Zuma said during a question and answer session in Parliament, when in 2012 he had insisted his family had paid for his family’s dwellings at Nkandla.

In reality, public protector Thuli Madonsela’s finding was not nearly so blunt.

“President Zuma told Parliament that his family had built its own houses and the state had not built any of it or benefited them. This was not true,” Madonsela wrote in her report on Nkandla entitled Secure in Comfort.

Madonsela said she accepted Zuma’s explanation that it had been a mistake and although it could legitimately be seen as misleading Parliament, it did not amount to an ethical violation.

Zuma also insisted that Madonsela’s report did not deal with houses, when it did, and stressed that his family had been found to have benefited “indirectly” from state spending on security.

In fact the idea of indirect benefit never appears in Madonsela’s report, although both “improper” and “undue” benefits do.

Four days prior to Zuma’s appearance in Parliament, Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa said a public protector report had found allegations involving her unsubstantiated, when in reality those allegations had in fact been substantiated.

Molewa also insisted that there had been no abuse of state resources in the incident investigated, when in fact the protector found the exact opposite.