Best thing Gcaleka can do is restore the public trust

Three years is a very long time in politics – and six years almost a lifetime.

Advocate Busisiwe Mkhwebane, South Africa’s first public protector to be removed from office by the same body that overwhelmingly recommended her appointment seven years earlier, went from being accused of being a spy by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in 2017, to “we never called her a spy” in 2020.

In 2023, after leaving the public protector’s office via impeachment, she joined a party that had agreed with the Democratic Alliance (DA) that she was a spy.

“A wise man always changes his mind” and “there are no permanent enemies or friends in politics”, get thrown around when politicians flip-flop like Julius Malema has on Mkhwebane, showing disregard for principle and settling for opportunistic convenience.

The Office of the Public Protector was not always as prominent as it is now. In fact, very few people can remember what Judge Selby Baqwa or advocate Lawrence Mushwana achieved by way of protecting citizens from abuse of power while in office.

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It was only during the height of the state capture years that advocate Thuli Madonsela set the office apart from other Chapter 9 institutions by showing no favour or fear to then president Jacob Zuma.

When she found that state funds had been used to help build Zuma’s Nkandla homestead and ordered that he pays back the money, little did she and the country know she had set in motion events that laid the foundation for the strengthening of her office but also seeds of its destruction.

The EFF’s chant “payback the money” every time Zuma tried to give an address in the National Assembly, laid the seeds for his removal from office a few years later. But the red berets’latching onto the public protector’s Nkandla report like that, made all political parties aware of the power of the office, and to an extent led to the politicisation of the process that is used to appoint a public protector.

After the appointment of Mkhwebane, it was quite clear Madonsela didn’t trust her to do justice on the follow-up of her recommended remedial action, which is why she went straight to the Constitutional Court. Politics had irrevocably tainted the office she was leaving.

Mkhwebane, to the country’s dismay, quickly confirmed that the DA were right in being opposed to her appointment.

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She became the darling of the Zuma-led radical economic transformation (RET) faction. Being viewed as politically aligned to the RET faction did not hide her incompetence, though. It just shielded her from being easily removed from office, and earned a job after being removed from office.

After Zuma’s removal from office, Malema and his party suddenly realised she was simply a persecuted African child, and no longer the spy they had alleged she was.

The way Mkhwebane politically aligned herself has brought a vengeful toxicity into the office, so much that even the DA’s Glynnis Breytenbach felt justified to insinuate that incoming public protector Kholeka Gcaleka only advanced in her job because of a “very cosy relationship” with Menzi Simelane, her former boss at the National Prosecuting Authority.

In her role as acting public protector, Gcaleka didn’t cover herself in glory either because of her perceived favouritism towards President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Phala Phala farm scandal ruling.

The best thing Gcaleka can do over the next seven years, is to restore the public trust in the office, making rulings competently and displaying no leaning towards any political formation.

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