One last nut to crack as Madonsela goes

THIS coming week marks the end of an era. Thuli Madonsela, arguably the greatest public servant in South African history, will finish her term as public protector on Friday. In her seven-year term she has once and forever established her office as the powerful instrument for the public good and for executive accountability that it was always intended to be.

There is something odd about Madonsela that made it possible for her to do what her predecessors could not. She literally has no fear and her pursuit and achievement of justice in the Nkandla affair is an enormously precious gift to us and our children. Put the right person into this job and no member of the executive, no member of the bureaucracy can safely abuse their position again. The public protector, Thuli Madonsela has taught us, is the law.

We all know she has one last job to do this week. On Thursday she spent four hours with President Jacob Zuma, interviewing him with a view to extracting evidence or testimony that she will use for her final report — an investigation into state capture, or, to give it its real name, the ties between Zuma and the Gupta family.

Zuma played games with her. These are not questions he wants to answer because truthful answers would betray him as someone’s puppet. But that’s the reason the state capture inquiry is so important. South Africans have a right to know who decides for them and how their taxes are spent. It isn’t Zuma. He’s captured by the Guptas. One day we might also have a inquiry into who pulls the Guptas’ strings, but it can wait.

Zuma’s ruse on Thursday was to formally appoint Madonsela’s successor, Busisiwe Mkhwebane, to the job. He could have done that at any time in the past month but he picked his moment carefully. A few hours later he was suggesting to Madonsela that it would be better if her successor ran the inquiry. Madonsela persisted. Zuma has known about the state capture inquiry since March and the questions should be no surprise to him.

So she extracted a promise from the president, as I understand it, that he would answer her questions in writing by tomorrow, Monday.

She is so smart, this woman. It isn’t that she is trying to stitch up Mkhwebane, leaving unfinished work on her desk. She is trying to stitch up Zuma. Whatever his answers to Madonsela, however evasive they are, they will be in the record. And what you tell the public protector can be used against you in a court of law. The public protector has the powers, or the status, of a judge president, so she is not to be trifled with.

Poor Zuma. The advice he gets in situations like this is almost always malignant and detrimental to his interests. If he had any sense he’d ask Jeremy Gauntlett what to do — as he did when he realised Madonsela and others had cornered him on Nkandla. Gauntlett would tell him to tell the truth.

The truth would then expose the rot in the Zuma administration and the extent of state capture, and guess what? The Guptas would speed up their departure from South Africa. Some prosecutions of officials and executives and directors of stateowned companies might ensue, but Zuma would go free and a relieved nation would probably thank him for his candour.

Obviously that’s not going to happen. The tentacles of corruption are wound deep and wide around Zuma’s government. There is no way he can tell Madonsela what is really going on.

But neither can he lie to her. One lie (and there are lots of people around who know bits of the truth because they’ve seen it) and he’s back in court, losing and appealing, losing again, appealing again, until it gets to the point of no return (again) on Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. Then it’ll be too late to help him. Madonsela will produce a report before she leaves on Friday. It won’t be complete but it will be powerful and we will all get to see it. She will make sure of that.

Zuma’s big mistake was obviously to appoint her in the first place. She was already a sharp and experienced lawyer when she started. She’d helped draft the constitution, and was a full-time member of the South African Law Reform Commission. She knew her stuff. What was he thinking? Good luck, Ma’am.

Whatever Zuma’s answers, however evasive, they will be in the record