By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Suspended public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane has been found guilty of incompetence and misconduct by parliament’s ad hoc committee investigating her fitness to hold office.
Members of the Section 194 Committee met on Sunday to continue working on its draft report into Mkhwebane’s fitness to hold office.
The committee agreed that Mkhwebane is guilty of misconduct for ignoring various court findings and victimising officials during her tenure as the head of the Chapter 9 institution.
Mkhwebane, suspended since June last year, will be given the report for review and required to give a written comment in response.
After that, the committee will draw up its final report for tabling in the National Assembly for determination.
Two-thirds of the National Assembly must support the report for adoption.
The process is expected to be completed by August, as Mkhwebane’s non-renewable seven-year term ends in October.
“We will provide the Public Protector with a final audit before adopting a final report that will be sent to the National Assembly,” said the committee’s chairperson Qubudile Dyantyi.
On the Vrede matter, the committee on Sunday dwelled on the fact that Mkhwebane raised funding constraints as a reason for not further pursuing her investigation – her final report that made no findings against high-level politicians – but in the same period spent vast sums on litigation.
Evidence leader Advocate Nazreen Bawa noted that in this period, Mkhwebane pursued a case against Democratic Alliance MP Glynnis Breytenbach alleging that she had been a spy at a cost of almost R2.3 million.
“Quite a bit of that was incurred during the period in which there wasn’t money to deal with the Vrede matter.”
DA MP Kevin Mileham commented that it seemed clear that Mkhwebane chose to spend her office’s resources on political crusades and litigations she was bound to lose rather than the work that forms its core mandate. ANC MP Bekizwe Nkosi agreed, saying she had shifted resources from other programmes to legal resources.
The Vrede report was taken on review by the DA and the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution and set aside in 2019.
In her judgment, judge Ronel Tolmay said Mkhwebane had “side-stepped all the crucial aspects regarding the complaints” and failed to carry out her constitutional duty.
That ruling and the courts’ withering pronouncements in review proceedings on the CR17, SARS and Bankorp-CIEX reports formed the spine of the charge sheet before the committee. Members agreed that her reports, particularly in the SARS matter, showed that she lacked impartiality and was prone to embarking on an investigation with a particular outcome in mind.