Cape Town - MPs sitting in the committee looking into suspended Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s fitness to hold office questioned her predecessor, Thuli Madonsela, on her management style in a bid to see how she differed from Mkhwebane.
The MPs wanted to know how Madonsela behaved when investigators missed deadlines and how the think tanks she formed helped improve or streamline performance at the office when she was in charge.
Previous witnesses testified at the commission that Mkhwebane placed enormous pressure on the staff and had unrealistic expectations of them to deliver.
Those witnesses were called to address accusations against Mkhwebane of harassing and intimidating employees and claims that she interfered in HR issues.
Madonsela also testified that at the end of her term in October 2016 she and Mkhwebane had not managed to have the kind of handover she would have liked and said they had “been overtaken by the storms of life”.
When the committee agreed to Mkhwebane’s request to summon Madonsela as a witness, it limited the areas of her testimony to CIEX/South African Reserve Bank and the Vrede Dairy matters. Both investigations were started during Madonsela’s tenure, but were completed by Mkhwebane.
Regarding the Vrede Dairy probe, Madonsela said in her affidavit that the investigation was conducted by the PPSA regional office in Bloemfontein during her term.
The investigator and her team struggled, with drafts being sent back from her and from their peers in the Think Tank, presumably because the investigator had primarily been doing service failure investigations.
Madonsela testified that until her tenure, regional offices did not conduct investigations on complex matters. She said even after training they still failed to meet the standards in the Standard Operating Protocol (SOP) which she personally developed and issued as a handbook.
She said some of the key reasons for this failure were the omission of names and failure to conduct a forensic investigation, which is compulsory in the SOP in matters where corrupt relationships are alleged or suspected.