Political process done right

THIS week’s parliamentary ethics committee decision on sacked communications minister Dina Pule shows what political action, when correctly harnessed, looks like. Despite fears of a whitewash for the sake of political expediency, the report was a devastating indictment of Pule’s brief ministerial reign.

It flagged her as a liar who manipulated her department to benefit her boyfriend and, when exposed, scrambled to hide the truth in such a hamfisted way that the embarrassment for President Jacob Zuma’s administration would have been too overwhelming to bear. Little wonder that Zuma fired her last month.

Of course, the fact that Pule is an untrustworthy liar is not a surprise to this newspaper. She had lied so often that it seemed only a matter of time before she was exposed.

But that the committee was willing to carry out its mandate and expose one of its own in such a nonpartisan way and so unequivocally is encouraging for the political processes.

There have been suggestions that it was only because Pule was a political pariah, ousted from the ANC’s national executive after Mangaung last year and fired by Zuma, that she was so utterly flayed by parliament last week.

Perhaps there may even be truth in that. But for the moment, we need to look at the chips as they fall: give kudos to a parliamentary committee designed to probe the ethics of elected politicians that scrutinised a member and found her wanting.

Ben Turok’s committee imposed the harshest possible sentence, light though it was. But it also referred the case to the police for further investigation.

Compared to the never-ending Marikana commission and the topsyturvy arms commission, where staff are resigning so often it might as well be an SABC boardroom, the ethics committee raises questions about why these other two committees have not been able to get it together in more time than it took parliament to pass a judgment on Pule.

The answer would appear to lie in politics and the equivocal signals from the ruling party about corruption. Political considerations, and the very real possibility of the ANC being embarrassed, have virtually condemned the arms deal commission to inertia.

The ANC needs to prove it is better than that — and the Pule inquiry could be the template.

The executive needs to kick-start the arms commission, as unlikely as this might seem. And it needs to take parliament’s ethics committee seriously and remove Pule from the transport portfolio committee that it appointed her to only this week.

Anything less is an insult to the men and women appointed as the guardians of this country’s democracy.