Parliament is still considering whether the public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane is fit to hold office or not. It can still find either way.
However, there is a sense in which she did not do herself any favours in the discharge of this important role.
This is notwithstanding the many cases that she has been able to resolve but which, when compared with the major ones she has pursued and lost, pale into insignificance.
For one thing, Mkhwebane terribly misconstrued her role as public protector. One could discern in her approach that she was seriously on the warpath to prove she was not her predecessor Thuli Madonsela.
Therefore, in approaching her cases, she displayed an enthusiasm to move the office of the public protector from being critical of the powers that be to an accommodating view of wayward politicians – for example, in some of the Free State cases.
This is most probably because she thought of herself as a deployed cadre of the ANC who was required to play an activist political role in bringing about transformation in society.
Many cases attest to this. A glaring one is that she veered into forbidden territory for a public protector to want to make recommendations as to what the policy of the Reserve Bank should be, which was not within her powers.
Again, she injected herself into the political environment when she got involved in the CIEX report about the repayment of monies by institutions that had benefited from apartheid largesse.
It was legitimate to pursue both these issues, but they should have been left to politicians, not a Chapter 9 institution such as the public protector.
* Dr Thabisi Hoeane, Pretoria.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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