Public Protector Thuli Madonsela delivers her final
Nkandla report in Pretoria in March. Picture: PUXLEY MAKGATHO
PUBLIC Protector Thuli Madonsela used to be a loyal member of the African National Congress. Now she’s at loggerheads with the ruling party after exposing alleged wrongdoing by top politicians including President Jacob Zuma.
Since Mr Zuma appointed Ms Madonsela to the post in 2009, he has fired three ministers and a police chief she said were guilty of impropriety. No Cabinet ministers were dismissed as a result of a probe by Ms Madonsela’s predecessor, Lawrence Mushwana.
Last month Ms Madonsela found Mr Zuma unduly benefited from state-funded renovations on his private home and recommended he repay some of the money.
"The difference between her and the others is that she has taken her mandate seriously," says Pierre de Vos, a law professor at the University of Cape Town. "She is a person of integrity. That hasn’t always played well with those who’ve been called to account."
The soft-spoken Ms Madonsela, a 51-year-old single mother of two who quotes from the Bible in speeches, said politicians’ criticisms were misdirected and she was not backing down. "Are we going to criticise the referee or the red-carded parties?" she asked in an April 4 speech at the University of Johannesburg. "For the system to hold, we need to be consistent and ensure that there is no impunity."
The daughter of informal traders who grew up in Soweto, Ms Madonsela became a civil rights activist in the 1980s while working part-time as a teacher. She earned a law degree from the University of Witwatersrand and held several labour union and academic posts. With the end of apartheid in 1994, she was appointed to a technical committee that drafted the Constitution. She forfeited a scholarship to Harvard Law School to take the job. She joined the then Department of Justice, where she worked for eight years, after rejecting an ANC offer to become an MP after the 1994 elections. Prior to her current job, she managed the South African Law Reform Commission, a state advisory body.
"She is strong-willed and has a strong sense of what is right," says Cathy Albertyn, a law professor at the University of Witwatersrand who has known Ms Madonsela since the early 1990s and worked with her at the Wits Centre for Applied Legal Studies and the Law Reform Commission. "Those two things make somebody who is prepared to stand up to power."
Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, a lawyer who served as a part-time commissioner on the Law Reform Commission, says Ms Madonsela was instrumental in ensuring the Law Reform Commission retained its autonomy and did not become an extension of the Department of Justice. "If there was anything that distinguished her, it must have been her independence."
Ms Madonsela’s appointment as public protector in October 2009 received full support from all parties in Parliament.
Ms Madonsela’s refusal to kowtow to politicians became evident a few months after taking office when she admonished Mr Zuma for failing to meet a deadline to declare his assets and business interests within 60 days of taking office.
The casualties of her investigations include former police commissioner Bheki Cele, who she said broke procurement rules when he authorised payment for a R500m lease for police headquarters, and former public works minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde, who Ms Madonsela said failed to co-operate in the lease probe. The late Sicelo Shiceka, when local governance and traditional affairs minister, was alleged to have used state funds to visit his girlfriend in a Swiss jail. All three, who denied wrongdoing, were fired.
Last year, Mr Zuma replaced Dina Pule as communications minister, after Ms Madonsela found she had persistently lied and engaged in unethical conduct. Ms Pule told Parliament on August 20 she had made a mistake and apologised.
The public protector’s office has probed a litany of complaints against the government and state companies that did not make headlines, with more than 40,000 processed in the year to end-March.
Ms Madonsela has her critics. Members of Parliament’s justice committee said that during heated hearings in May last year she failed to respond to questions about why she decided to take on some investigations. She replied that the MPs oversaw only her office’s budget and had no right to interrogate her about probes. "I was a little uncomfortable with the rigour of the questioning," says Steve Swart, who represents the African Christian Democratic Party on the committee. "She has a certain view of her mandate and some committee members hold a different view. It’s not easy terrain."
"The type of matters she takes on and the complaints she investigates have an impact on millions of people," says Bonita Meyersfeld, a law professor who heads the Wits Centre for Applied Legal Studies. "She has fastidiously prioritised the needs of people who otherwise aren’t able to have a voice that is heard by the authorities … she has injected heroism back into the law profession."
No comments:
Post a Comment