Suspended Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane and her legal representative, Advocate Dali Mpofu (fetching in a blue-and-white Xhosa headdress) on Thursday revived and showcased evidence used during Mkhwebane’s investigation into donations to then Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidential bid in 2017.
“For me, this is a matter of life and death. I am being accused of gross negligence, of targeting people and misconduct, and I think if you go back to the charge, I am trying to prove the evidence that was before me,” she told the Section 194 committee investigating her fitness to hold office.
Mkhwebane’s report on the CR17 campaign was set aside by lower courts as “irrational” and “fatally flawed”. Constitutional Court Judge Chris Jafta confirmed these rulings, saying Mkhwebane had moulded the wording of the Executive Ethics Code in her report for her own purpose, with no authority to do so.
Read more in Daily Maverick: “Another Mkhwebane report bites the dust, and it’s all clear for an impeachment inquiry”
Mkhwebane is accused of inserting the words “deliberate and inadvertently misleading” so that it could match the evidence.
“Having effected the change in the code, the Public Protector proceeded to conclude that the President had violated the code. It is unacceptable that the Public Protector did what no law had authorised her to do,” Jafta said at the time.
On Thursday, Mkhwebane and Mpofu repeatedly stated that neither accepted court judgments or rulings, and that these were not cast in stone.
Mkhwebane’s refusal to accept the decision of the courts resulted in her launching a rescission application, which failed, after which she laid a complaint with the Judicial Service Commission against the now-retired Judge Jafta over his ruling.
It had, she asserted, “exposed me to unwelcome criminal, civil and professional proceedings as a legal practitioner”.
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'Opposition Party plots'
On Wednesday, Mkhwebane accused the Democratic Alliance and the governing African National Congress of plotting together and being in “cahoots” in seeking to have her impeached.
The entire process, she claimed, was a political witch-hunt because she was a black woman who had excelled at her job, a little David with a sling taking on Goliath.
Read more in Daily Maverick: “Busisiwe Mkhwebane claims probe nothing more than ANC and DA political witch-hunt for touching ‘untouchables’”
On Thursday, Mkhwebane said the complaint about Ramaphosa’s campaign donations had come from the then-DA leader, Mmusi Maimane. It was also Maimane who brought the supposed beneficiaries of the Guptas’ Vrede Dairy scam to her offices. She had not interacted with them previously.
Whereas the DA appeared to be working hand-in-glove with the ANC to plot her impeachment; in the CR17 matter, it seems the DA was ganging up on its “partner” the ANC, its leader and the President of the country.
Maimane’s complaint was followed by another on the same issue by EFF deputy leader Floyd Shivambu.
Much of what flowed from the testimony by Mkhwebane has already been hashed out in litigation to defend this particular report.
The millions that had circulated between accounts pointed to suspected “money laundering”, as Maimane put it, and with which Mkhwebane agreed.
These funders were “very important economic players in the South African economy” and the money they had donated could raise “reasonable suspicion that they were buying influence”, said Mkhwebane.
“What I’m trying to show is the untouchables, some of them being in the big business, which, yes, the information has been sealed and hence I’m saying the process that was followed in sealing them, which we never agreed with when we were litigating because it was just sealed in chambers.”
She claimed this had been done to prevent the records from being made public.
In a day of selective testimony, much of it by omission, there was no mention that the records were sealed by Judge Aubrey Ledwaba as they had contained personal details. But the evidence leader, Advocate Nazreen Bawa, is bound to fill in gaps during her cross-examination of Mkhwebane.
The court itself had access to all the statements and emails that formed the basis of Mkhwebane’s investigation and conclusions.
Mighty Piet ‘Decuplets’ Rampedi
One of the first journalists to break the CR17 funding “scandal” was Piet Rampedi, the former editor of the Independent Group’s Pretoria News, and of the fake stolen “decuplets” story.
Read more in Daily Maverick: “Piet Rampedi resigns from Independent Media, still insisting his decuplet story is accurate – statement”
Another journalist who had worked on the first CR17 leaks was Mzilikazi wa Afrika, a former Sunday Times staffer and a key part of the investigative team that worked on SARS “rogue unit” stories, which were later retracted.
Mpofu on Thursday hailed both as “ace” journalists and praised Rampedi for having one of the most “illustrious careers”, including at the Sunday Times.
Just to recap what is already public knowledge: the leaked CR17 bank statements revealed millions of rands transferred between the CR17 accounts and the Cyril Ramaphosa Foundation. The names were made public in a leak before the sealing of the record.
Mkhwebane told the committee the three biggest donations — of between R30-million and R51-million — were from the same donor.
CR17 donors included former Imperial Holdings chief executive Mark Lamberti, financial services company Sygnia, board member Andre Crawford-Brunt, Goldman Sachs Southern African chief executive Colin Coleman and Eskom board member Sifiso Dabengwa.
The eNCA director and owner of Hosken Consolidated Investments, Johnny Copelyn, was reported to have donated R2-million, while former Absa chief executive Maria Ramos forked out R1-million to one of the CR17 trust accounts.
The courts later found that Mkhwebane had failed to prove that Ramaphosa received the funding as a personal benefit which should have been declared to Parliament.
These large sums of money circulating from private companies, “when looked at carefully” created the risk of some sort of “State Capture” by those making donations, Mkhwebane said. This was a view expressed in former Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s minority judgment in that matter.
Mkhwebane said what she aimed to do was “convince the committee that, upon any objective enquiry, there will be no option but to endorse the views expressed in the minority [Mogoeng] judgment, whilst acknowledging the legal status of the majority judgment”.
Think about it.
All this depended, she added, on whether the committee “adopts the view that its role is to rubber-stamp the relevant court judgments or to independently enquire into the issues raised in the charges”. DM