In South Africa's twisted version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Tony Stark (Iron Man) - a rich, spoilt billionaire with a fabulous house - is played by President Jacob Zuma. His rebellious robotic brainchild, Ultron, is played to perfection by Advocate Thuli Madonsela.Despite the ANC's insistence otherwise, she is not the party's political enemy and she has no ostensible axe to grind with the president. She is just a deeply religious nerd who does the job allocated to her with uncommon resolve and efficiency.Madonsela has not destroyed the Zuma presidency, largely because there is nothing left to destroy. But she has destroyed Zuma's legacy. Her "Secure in Comfort" report, and the resulting Constitutional Court judgment that validated her findings, wiped away the last shred of the president's credibility.History will treat the dude viciously, which may seem like a small consolation, given that we still have the future to deal with.As Zuma's tenure draws to a close, the stakes rise: if he and his cronies don't weasel their way into the Treasury's vault, if they don't secure themselves at the front of the ANC's feeding trough come the electoral conference in 2017 (and maybe sooner?), Zuma could end his days in penury.Cue the action movie soundtrack, because the time has come to create an All New Amazing Public Protector. In the basement of Stark/Zuma's computer science lab, we find the beginnings of Zuma's Ultron upgrade: the resolutely awful Judge Siraj Desai.Make no mistake, the guy has emerged as the ANC's frontrunner for a reason. Zuma's two most important appointments outside of Cabinet - Madonsela as public protector, and Mogoeng Mogoeng as chief justice of the Constitutional Court - have taught the president a brutal lesson.Zuma assumed that both Madonsela and Mogoeng were identical versions of the same model: devout conservative Christian legal pedants.The odds were in his favour. And he lost. Twice.He cannot afford to lose again.The public protector is one of a number of Chapter Nine institutions that serve as checks and balances on a government bureaucracy so vast that it affects every last element of South African life. The framers of the constitution surely considered the possibility of a president whose primary interest was securing the world's largest ever golden handshake. (They were, after all, Robert Mugabe's neighbours.) But they were mostly concerned with the dull, prosaic screw-ups that are inherent in any massive bureaucracy.In a functioning constitutional democracy, the public protector should serve as a sort of waste disposal unit, dealing with the bureaucratic effluent no one really wants to think about. Even in an imperfect universe, most South Africans should have no clue who serves in that office, because they shouldn't need to care.Instead, the office has become the one thing keeping us from submitting entirely to a vast kleptocratic scam perpetrated by a governing party that operates on an endless network of patronage.Quaintly, South Africans seem to think the recent municipal elections, which resulted in the opposition running the bulk of the country's metros, have changed the status quo.In some ways that's true, but in more important ways they've merely amped up the urgency of those who hope to eat their fill.Perhaps the most hideous thing about Jacob Zuma's reign of thievery is that he has reduced us to begging for messiahs, the most important being Thuli Madonsela's replacement.Which brings us to the good judge Desai. Of all the ghastly humans that the ANC could have dredged from the judiciary to serve as their number one public protector candidate, perhaps Siraj is the most successful.We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the rape accusations that have dogged him since 2004. You'll recall that Desai was accused of raping a woman named Salome Isaacs in Mumbai. Never touched her, he adamantly told the Indian police, and then later conceded to the fact that they'd - wait for it! - engaged in consensual sex. (Now this is Zuma's kind of judge, no?)The charge was withdrawn under oath, but this doesn't make Desai any less a liar.Should a bullshitter - regarding something so utterly, gravely serious as sexual contact with a rape accuser - serve as public protector?No. Immediate disqualification.But, see, Desai is a judge, which is a very important job that demands immense levels of integrity. But does it, really? There are good judges, and there are bad judges. As it happens, Judge Desai is neither, mostly because he's an incredibly lazy judge. He has had but 32 notable judgments in his two decades on the bench.Should someone so unengaged with the work of the bench be tasked with the much harder graft of Publicly Protecting the Public, with up to 40000 cases that need to be addressed every year?No.One would imagine that the public protector demands Madonsela-scale reserves of calm and cool-headedness. But Judge Desai comes off like a muscle-head on a steroid binge. He flipped out last week during the second round of interviews after he was asked about the Salome Isaacs case. Who is a judge to be grilled by mere public servants? And who among us mortals would be up to all the grilling?But unlike most of us, Siraj Desai and the others who accepted the public protector nomination literally asked for all the scrutiny. In order to qualify for that tasty pay package and tastier pension - to say nothing of the corporate speaking engagements that follow - Desai and company submitted to the questioning of the country's paid representatives.Should someone so touchy be allowed the privilege of Public Protecting?HELL no.(And we haven't even touched on the weird scandal involving former Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe, in which Desai became embroiled with a defamation case against a development company.)But you know what completely disqualifies Desai from the public protector position? The fact that the ANC is so desperate for him to have it. They believe, just as Zuma does, that they've created, finally!, the perfect Ultron - a robot who won't turn on its masters. Can Judge Desai be the perfect quisling for a president who is supposed to be number one defender of the constitution, but is in fact the number one defiler of the constitution?You betcha.This piece was first published in the Daily Maverick..