It is over for Adv Busisiwe Mkhwebane after many years of Stalingrad tactics. The National Assembly on Monday voted in favour of adopting the section 194 inquiry’s recommendation that suspended public protector Mkhwebane be permanently removed from office. She now has the dubious honour of being the first head of a constitutional chapter 9 office to be impeached.
It took three years and 24 witnesses before the inquiry and a two-thirds majority (318 MPs voted against her) could remove the public protector from office, in a first for parliament. The decision was overwhelmingly supported by the ruling ANC, the main opposition, the DA and other smaller parties, while the EFF were against her removal.
The vote means Mkhwebane will leave office about a month before her term expires in mid-October, a date that has been the topic of much debate around whether her forced postponements upon postponements have been strategic to help her secure her pension and other benefits if she remained in office for the full term. Though she may still challenge the decision in court, South Africa can today heave a sigh of relief.
She was also found to have acted outside the mandate of her office, lying under oath and acting in bad faith — and was ordered to personally pay the costs of the legal action, a ruling she took all the way to the Constitutional Court and lost.
Mkhwebane took over from the highly respected Thuli Madonsela, whose hard work earned the office of the public protector an impeccable reputation. But soon after her 2016 appointment, when Jacob Zuma was still president, Mkhwebane started with her antics. In 2017, she tried to amend the constitution and recommended that parliament nationalise the SA Reserve Bank, a bid that was set aside by a high court decision that said she had violated the principle of separation of powers. She was also found to have acted outside the mandate of her office, lying under oath and acting in bad faith — and was ordered to personally pay the costs of the legal action, a ruling she took all the way to the Constitutional Court and lost.
From there, it all went from bad to worse. Her next low point was the release of the Vrede dairy farm project report, which exonerated the Gupta family and former Free State premier Ace Magashule from any wrongdoing. We know, thanks to testimony before chief justice Raymond Zondo’s state capture inquiry, that the multimillion-rand Vrede dairy farm project was a cesspool of murder, assault, death threats and disempowerment. The dairy farm project was meant to assist 100 black emerging farmers, but the money for the beneficiaries was channelled to the Gupta family, under then Free State premier Magashule’s watch.
The injustice of having a hand in defending those who nearly crippled our state is beyond comprehension, but this is exactly what Mkhwebane did. Her report was eventually set aside and again she was penalised with a cost order. But the damage had been done.
In a way, her removal from office is both a sad and happy day for South Africa. Sad to think the office of the public protector, meant to uphold values such as honesty and good faith, had fallen into the hands of an individual whose actions belied her oath. But a happy day that her tenure is finally over, a confirmation that albeit lengthy, we do still possess the processes to bring a rightful end to the injury our nation suffered. She’s clearly the guardian who was misguiding the nation.
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