Public Protector Thuli Madonsela has dismissed Police Minister Nathi Nhleko’s report to Parliament on the Nkandla saga, saying it contains “mis-statements, inaccuracies, incomplete information, innuendoes and false accusations”.
She would write to President Jacob Zuma - who Nhleko said did not have to repay a cent for Nkandla - to “point out the limitations” in the minister’s report so the president was able to “make an informed decision not based on withheld or distorted information”, Madonsela said yesterday.
Madonsela said she believed the “shortcomings” of Nhleko’s report were “partly due” to the fact that he was a member of the executive whose members, including Zuma, whom she called the minister’s “supervisor”, were “among the public functionaries found to have acted improperly” in her report.
She credited Nhleko with having given the matter “his best” and having “applied his mind to the issues at hand”. Turning to examples of the report’s shortcomings, Madonsela said it was incorrect, as stated, that she had found “no public funds” had been used to build the president’s houses.
She stood by her report and, in her understanding of the Constitution and the law, neither the executive, nor the legislature could override her findings.
Madonsela has said she would seek to participate in the hearing of an appeal against the ruling of Judge Ashton Schippers of the Western Cape High Court that her findings were not binding or enforceable. Judge Schippers said in that judgment, however, that an organ of state which rejected the public protector’s findings had to provide cogent reasons for doing so.
Madonsela said Nhleko’s report had not attempted to review hers, instead making “random and sometimes adverse comments on isolated aspects of the report”.
Regarding suggestions only security experts could determine which features had a legitimate security function - the focus of Nhleko’s report after Madonsela said the visitor’s centre, cattle kraal, swimming pool and amphitheatre were not security items - she said this could not “possibly be rational”.
She had relied on authorising instruments and the decisions of authorised people and structures to determine which items were security measures.
She said “the very same experts” had prepared a list of things Zuma should pay for.
The DA’s lawyers have been poring over Nhleko’s report with a view to mounting a legal challenge.
The chairman of the DA federal executive, James Selfe, said the lawyers believed the report was “deeply problematic” from a legal point of view and factually incorrect. There were two possible lines of attack: that the report was inherently biased because Nhleko relied on Zuma for his job, and his conclusions did not pass the test of rationality.
The minister’s report is also headed for political turbulence when the ad hoc committee that considered Madonsela’s report, as well as those of the Special Investigating Unit, an interministerial task team and Zuma’s response to these, among others, is reconstituted by resolution of the National Assembly on Tuesday.
Opposition parties and civil society organisations have scoffed at Nhleko’s presentation on Thursday, which included multimedia demonstrations of the “fire pool” in operation, among others.
But Professor Mtende Mhango, deputy head of the Wits Law School, said Parliament had asked Nhleko to probe the question of which items were non-security measures and he had been “within his rights to go into the areas he has gone into and create the effect of the determinations he has made”.
The issue now was what Parliament would decide and how this would relate to Madonsela’s report.
Pretoria News Weekend