The Public Protector should do the decent thing and resign

Yesterday the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria set aside the Public Protector’s report into President Cyril Ramaphosa’s campaign funding as well as her finding that he deliberately misled Parliament last year.

It was another scathing judgment against Busisiwe Mkhwebane, with the judges ruling that she displayed a "complete lack of basic knowledge of the law and its application" and that some of her findings were "unfathomable". 

This came as no surprise to me.  

Last year I wrote a column expressing my belief that the report had serious, but obvious shortcomings.  

 You certainly did not need a law degree to have seen that.  

With just a tiny bit of logic, even the most politically uninformed person would have been able to reach the conclusion that there were fundamental mistakes in her report. 

The question remains: how did she not see that? 

Let's first remind ourselves of what happened.

On 6 November 2018, the President answered a question relating to VBS in Parliament.

The former leader of the DA, Mmusi Maimane, asked a supplementary question relating to a contract that the President’s son Andile Ramaphosa allegedly had with Bosasa.  

Since the original question related to VBS, the President had not seen Maimane’s question in advance and did not need to have answered the follow-up question.

(Something the Public Protector made a big deal about in her original report.) 

In his response during the PP's subsequent investigation, the President stated that he had heard about his son's contract with Bosasa two months earlier and had assumed that was what Maimane’s question had referred to.

It was only once he had left the chamber that one of his campaign managers informed him that it related to CR17 campaign funding.

After investigating the matter, he paid the money back and then wrote to the Speaker to set the record straight?