Public Protector Thuli Madonsela is to shut some of her offices due to dire financial constraints. The first office that will be shut permanently is the Siyabuswa regional office in Mpumalanga, and others will follow.Constitutional law professor Shadrack Gutto said the Treasury must explain why it was not able to sufficiently fund the office."It sounds like just another way of trying to weaken an office that has been seen to be so robust in meeting its constitutional obligation but that is embarrassing those who do not properly believe in building constitutionalism as a rule of law," Gutto said.The public protector's spokesman, Oupa Segalwe, said last night: "We are looking at where we can cut costs and the decision has been [to] close regional offices that are under-utilised and reopen them once our financial situation has improved.''Segalwe said that, ideally, Madonsela wanted a satellite office in each of the municipalities, but currently had between two and three offices in each province.Two years ago the public protector had had to cut back on it's mobile outreach programmes to far-flung rural areas because of a lack of funds.This had resulted in a significant drop in public complaints to the protector. Segalwe said the office had 276 vacant posts and this had implications on its investigative capacity. But it did not have the funding to appoint people to the posts.In April, Madonsela said her office had completed 21170 of 29303 of its cases and that she needed more funds to meet staffing plans approved by parliament.Madonsela was allocated R218-million in the last financial year and this was increased to R246-million this financial year. But this did not cover the requirements of her officeSegalwe said that, when Madonsela had delivered her strategic plan to parliament in May, she had said she needed R200-million more. A chunk of this would be to used to appoint more staff."Some would go towards litigation as we do not have a legal division, which means we have to use external lawyers and it is costly."The other portion would access more offices," he said.The extra R60-million allocated to the public protector's office by the Treasury in the 2014/2015 financial year - to be spread over three years - was a drop in the ocean, Segalwe said.Over the past three years Madonsela has called on parliament for more funding proportional to her office's workload.But she has had running battles with both parliament's justice portfolio committee and the ANC following her probe into security upgrades at President Jacob Zuma's Nkandla private home.The ANC chairman of the justice portfolio committee, Mathole Motshekga, has had heated debates with Madonsela, which have led to opposition parties questioning the stance taken by the government against her and her officeGutto appealed to people in regions where services would be curtailed to show that they would not allow a lack of funding as an excuse to deny them access to the services of the public protector...