Public Protector Adv. Busisiwe Mkhwebane has noted with disbelief news reports containing provocative statements attributed to the Deputy Secretary-General of the South African Communist Party (SACP), Solly Mapaila.

1. Public Protector challenges Mapaila to prove his claims or face possible legal action
Public Protector Adv. Busisiwe Mkhwebane has noted with disbelief news reports containing
provocative statements attributed to the Deputy Secretary-General of the South African Communist
Party (SACP), Solly Mapaila.
According to the reports, Mapaila, while addressing a policy conference of labour union, Nehawu, in
Johannesburg on Wednesday, labeled her a “hired gun of the ‘fight back’ agenda” who is used by “rogue
elements within the intelligence”, among many other things.
Adv. Mkhwebane takes serious exception to this vitriol and challenges Mr. Mapaila to produce evidence
to support his claims or retract the statements and apologise, failing which she will consider taking legal
steps against him.
It must be remembered that it was Mapaila’s party, the SACP, which, following the release of the
Nkandla report in 2014, vilified the then Public Protector, saying she abused her power and played into
“anti-democratic regime-change agenda that seeks to portray the entirety of government as corrupt”,
with its youth wing saying that she was “not God”.
The party also questioned the timing of the release of the report and went as far as to label the whole
Nkandla saga “white people’s lies”.
Later that year, in the wake of Western Cape High Court Judge, Ashton Schippers’ ruling that the Public
Protector’s remedial action was not binding, the Public Protector was once again at the receiving end of
the party’s tirade.
She was accused of misrepresenting the powers of her office, having a scant understanding the law,
cynically manipulating the role of the office to give it the powers it did not have and usurping the
powers of the judiciary.
Mapaila himself wrote in a blog that the then Public Protector acted as though her office was above all
other institutions supporting democracy.
His latest attacks on the office, which must be seen in the context of his party’s deep-seated contempt
for the office of the Public Protector, dating back to the Nkandla days, are premised on the tired and
unproven narrative that Adv. Mkhwebane is involved in factional battles of the governing party.
Mapaila must go read the Nkandla judgment, especially the part that refers to how the powers of the
Public Protector are not meant to bow down to anybody, including those that he might see as inherently
virtuous, and tell the public exactly whose alleged conduct the Public Protector must investigate and
whose must she dismiss on a hunch – and the reasons thereof.