Zille should’ve declared help for son – prof Jansen

A highly respected education expert has warned that Western Cape Premier Helen Zille should have publicly declared her involvement in assisting her son to obtain state tablets to conduct his private extra maths lessons for disadvantage school children.

Distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University, Jonathan Jansen, further cautioned politicians and company and academic leaders to stay away from anything that could expose them to a conflict of interest involving family members.

Jansen, who is passionate about education and is openly critical of some aspects of the current government education policy, is not convinced, even after Zille received support from an unlikely source in Minister of Education Angie Motshekga, by her decision to let her son use state facilities for private purposes.

The professor was reacting to a finding by Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane that Western Cape Premier and former DA leader Zille was guilty of a “conflict of interest” after her son, Paul Maree, loaned state tablets to conduct extra maths lessons to pupils at disadvantaged schools in the Western Cape in 2014, for which he was not paid.

The tablets were returned to the department afterwards.

Jansen said his view was that any leader of a company or political party or government department or university must at all times keep a clean line between their own work and the involvement of family members.

“While the involvement of family might be legally permissible and even commendable, it does not measure up to the highest ethical standards for leadership behaviour,” Jansen said.

He said it would have been wise, in this case, and “assuming there was no benefit whatsoever to the son, that Zille had publicly declared the issue and had it signed off by the relevant political authority”.

“It is in the grey areas where so many leaders slip up and fall – even with good intentions,” Jansen said.

In her report released on Wednesday, Mkhwebane said that Zille gave her son an “unfair advantage” with her facilitating for him to loan the tablets. She said Zille had exposed herself to a potential conflict by assisting Maree, then a maths teacher, to get the tablets from the department.

Mkhwebane ordered the Western Cape legislature speaker to take appropriate action within 30 working days, to hold Zille accountable.

Motshekga said there was nothing wrong in what Zille’s son had done.

Business Day reported that Motshekga had expressed her “disappointment” and “surprise” at Mkhwebane’s findings against Zille, who has vowed to challenge the finding and take the matter on judicial review.

DA leader Mmusi Maimane said what Maree did was for a good cause.

On Wednesday, Maimane tweeted: “The public protector’s finding on @helenzille is strange to say the least because Helen’s son was going beyond the call to deliver a valuable public service in the school holiday, for absolutely no benefit. Her (Mkhwebane’s) obsession with ‘balance’ is actually just bias,” he said.

Political analyst Somadoda Fikeni criticised Zille for not accepting responsibility and the DA for not taking action against her.

He said Zille had never accepted responsibility for any wrongdoing or failure, something he said was “in the DNA of some politicians”. He said the DA always avoided taking action against her.

“They always fail to deal with Zille but they acted so harshly against Patricia de Lille and they dealt with Dianne Kohler Barnard.

“The DA believe that there are rules for themselves and rules for others, they always believe they are above criticism,” Fikeni said.

– ericn@citizen.co.za

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