Thuli blames leak on delay ploy

PUBLIC protector Thuli Madonsela has blamed the leak of a version of her provisional report into the Nkandla security upgrades on the government’s delaying tactics.

She said yesterday that if the process had gone “according to plan”, the “crisis” of Friday’s leak in the Mail & Guardian would not have happened.

The “message” her office will communicate to the government is that the longer the process is delayed, the more likely there are to be leaks.

“The gap between the provisional report and the final report should be short,” she said.

Although deploring the leak, she said the real problem was that her “good faith” had been “abused by people intent on finding ways to delay and postpone” the process.

At the same time, Madonsela said, she was “not persuaded” by the argument that the leak was in the public interest.

“This may have arisen if we had a provisional report that had been sitting on my desk forever, but that is not the case.”

Security cluster ministers de- scended on her office within hours of the leak being published, wanting to know who had leaked it. But she said the mood was “polite” and they did not read her the riot act.

“We engaged in a very mature manner. There was no anger. It was a very mature and polite discussion. It wasn’t an emotional meeting — it was very polite.”

They seemed to accept her assurances that she had had

What do I benefit from leaking this report?

nothing to do with the leak.

Nevertheless, she felt the leak had “poisoned the waters” for her office. “It makes us look suspicious; it erodes our integrity. It makes me seem a bit of a dishonest broker.”

The ministers may or may not have been conciliatory, but former cabinet spokesman Jimmy Manyi has all but blamed Madonsela, calling her unprofessional and malicious.

“If we were being unprofessional and malicious, then the time to leak this report would have been when the ministers went to court,” she said.

“Now, when things have been normalised and the process is on track, what do I benefit from leaking this report?”

It has been suggested that the government might use the leak, which shows President Jacob Zuma in an extremely damning light, to discredit the whole process and fight the release of Madonsela’s final report the same way it has fought the release of the so-called Zuma spy tapes.

“They could try, but they’d only be fooling a few,” she said.

Any further delay in the process would “harm them more than it harms me, because if government plays hide and seek going forward, the version that informs the public discourse will be this version that purports to be a leak”.

She said she found it “curious” that the government and ANC did not object to a leak in the Sunday Independent some weeks ago, which suggested that her provisional report had cleared Zuma of any wrongdoing.

“Nobody came to my office then to ask who leaked this,” she said.