Another nail in Mkhwebane’s coffin
Public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s report on donations to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2017 campaign for the ANC presidency was intended to destroy him politically .
After the’release s opponents of her report on the R500,000 donation from the late Gavin Watson, CEO of African Global Operations (formerly Bosasa), Ramaphosa waged an unrelenting propaganda battle, releasing details of his funders on a weekly basis and trying to paint him as a bought and captured president.
It was an attempt to reprise the way that former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s Nkandla report haunted president Jacob Zuma for most of his second term, until he eventually conceded in the Constitutional Court and paid back some of the taxpayer funds spent on upgrading his private homestead.
But the attempt by Ramaphosa’s opponents to taint him on the basis of an investigation by an incompetent public protector was doomed to fail.
In yet another scathing ruling against Mkhwebane, a full bench of the Pretoria high court this week excoriated her report into the Ramaphosa campaign donations.
The court, before which the president had taken the report on review, set it aside and ordered punitive costs against the public protector.
It was another brutal putdown for Mkhwebane, whom the Constitutional Court has previously condemned for acting in bad faith, being dishonest and submitting “a number of falsehoods”.
The highest court in the land, ruling in the case involving her report into the apartheid-era bailout of Bankorp, said her “entire model of investigation was flawed”.
In similar vein, the Pretoria high court judges this week were contemptuous of the public protector’s grasp of legal basics.
“[She] then referred to Precca [the Prevention & Combating of Corrupt Activities Act] to found her conclusion that money laundering was involved,” their judgment reads.
“She made the firm finding that based on Precca, the evidence at her disposal established a prima facie suspicion of money laundering.
“We know that she had no evidence even remotely that money laundering was at play.
“We also know that Precca has nothing to do with money laundering.”
Then comes the twist of the knife: “The legislation that establishes the offence of money laundering is the Prevention of Organised Crime Act.”
The judges’ opinion serves to buttress an affidavit submitted to parliament last month by Sphelo Samuel, head of the public protector’s office in the Free State.
Samuel says Mkhwebane dismantled a long-standing task team that served as a quality control body for the reports emanating from her office — a team that might have picked up the flaws identified by the Pretoria high court.
Samuel writes: “It became clear to the majority, if not all of us, that she was either overwhelmed by the legal arguments presented for or against the adoption of a particular report, or did it to pursue her agenda of excluding us in the process and therefore silence our views.”
The EFF, which supported Mkhwebane’s legal fight against Ramaphosa, says it will appeal this week’s ruling. Mkhwebane may do the same.
But she now faces a stark risk — each judgment against her (and there are already many) further confirms that she is pursuing a nefarious agenda, and each adds to the case against her as parliament prepares to determine her fitness to hold office.
It is not going to be pretty. Her persistence and arrogance may in the end prove to be her undoing.
The Pretoria high court judges this week were contemptuous of the public protector’s grasp of legal basics