Steenhuisen slams ‘silly’ protector order

Public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s order that President Cyril Ramaphosa appear before parliament’s ethics committee over his CR17 election campaign funding was a “silly ruling”, DA leader John Steenhuisen said.

Steenhuisen also said he was not convinced Ramaphosa deliberately lied to the National Assembly over a R500,000 donation his campaign received from recently deceased Bosasa CEO Gavin Watson.

Steenhuisen’s stance stands in sharp contrast to that adopted by his predecessor, Mmusi Maimane, who laid the original complaint that led to Mkhwebane’s investigation and the far-reaching findings she made.

Mkhwebane found that Ramaphosa had lied to parliament and that his CR17 campaign might have been implicated in money-laundering.

Maimane, who has since resigned from the DA, strongly supported Mkhwebane’s findings and remedial action, which are now the subject of a legal challenge by Ramaphosa.

Steenhuisen said Mkhwebane failed to do basic research on the inability of the ethics committee to take action against officials, such as the president, who are no longer members of the house.

“This committee is empowered to enforce the code in terms of the code of ethical conduct relating to MPs.

“The president resigns his seat upon his election and is no longer a member of the house and is therefore beyond the reach of the ethics committee.

“Precedent for this exists in numerous cases — Malusi Gigaba, for example — where the ethics committee has resolved that since the member was not a member of the house, they were beyond the reach of the committee.

“Clearly the public protector did not even bother to pick up on this or even make a rudimentary attempt to acquaint herself with this issue before making a frankly silly ruling as she has done.”

Steenhuisen has also made it clear that he did not believe Mkhwebane’s legally unsound decisions were innocent mistakes.

 “I have no doubt that the various acts of omission and commission by the public protector over the last few years, as well as those she has chosen to pursue and those she has chosen to exonerate, and the manner in which these have been done, certainly points to some agenda.

“I am of the view that the public protector is compromised and has been pursuing a political agenda.

“I have always been of the view that Mkhwebane was planted in that role to pursue a pro-Zuma faction agenda.”

To support this argument, Steenhuisen has questioned why Mkhwebane exonerated former state security minister David Mahlobo of deliberately misleading parliament when he denied he had ever met Mcebo Dlamini, “yet in a press conference stated openly they had met several times, including at his home”.

Dlamini, an ANC Youth League member, was one of the leaders of the #FeesMustFall protests that led to the introduction of free tertiary education for the poor in the country.

“That was a deliberate lie, intended to mislead, yet the finding was different,”  Steenhuisen said.

He told Business Day he thought Ramaphosa made a grave and inexcusable error by responding to a question by Maimane about money paid by Watson to an account belonging to his son Andile without having all the facts in hand.

Ramaphosa originally said the money had been paid in connection with a consulting agreement between his son and African Global Operations (formerly Bosasa), but days later wrote to parliament and admitted that the money was, in fact, a donation paid to a CR17 campaign account.

“It all depends what you consider a lie to be,” Steenhuisen said.

“If the intent was to deliberately mislead the house then, no, I’m not entirely sure that was the case.

“The president, however, did mislead the house by foolishly rushing to answer the question and bluster his way through by the seat of his pants without the facts.”

Steenhuisen said the DA had “already triggered the new parliamentary rules for the process to remove the public protector and is committed to seeing the back of Mkhwebane from this important office”. — BusinessLIVE