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Can Thulisile Madonsela Save South Africa From Itself?
Can Thulisile Madonsela Save South Africa From Itself?
Alexis Okeowo, New York Times
16 June 2015
On a cloudy morning in March last year, dozens of reporters, photographers and camera crews gathered in the vast building that houses the offices of Thulisile Madonsela, South Africa’s public protector. The journalists assembled that day were searched by security, stripped of their phones, pens, notebooks and recording equipment and told to take a seat in a conference room. Madonsela’s staff gave each of them a thick document numbering almost 450 pages. Her assistants were posted by the windows, making sure no one was secretly leaking information. Outside, riot officers in armored vehicles stood watch. “There’s about 100 people in the room,” recalled Ranjeni Munusamy, a well-known editor at The Daily Maverick, a South African newspaper. “Everyone’s quiet and flipping through pages, and now and then you look up to see who is on what page. I went right to the end to look at the findings. When I saw them, I wanted to scream.”
Madonsela’s office falls somewhere between a government watchdog and a public prosecutor. It is one of the so-called Chapter Nine institutions that were established in the post-apartheid 1996 Constitution to help safeguard South Africa’s fledgling democracy. Most of the reports the office releases concern low-level government corruption; this one contained the results of Madonsela’s 18-month investigation into President Jacob Zuma.
The report found that three months after Zuma was first elected in May 2009, he used state funds to renovate his private residence, just south of the rural town Nkandla in the Zulu homeland of KwaZulu-Natal. He claimed that he needed to improve his security system. A few months after work began in August 2009, The Mail and Guardian, another South African newspaper, reported that the upgrades included a helipad, a clinic and at least three new houses for the president’s personal employees — and that the total cost had swelled to more than $5 million. The government maintained that only security enhancements were being made to Zuma’s homestead at taxpayer expense; Zuma told Parliament that he had paid for the extra improvements himself. But by the end of 2012, several South African citizens and a former opposition leader had filed complaints with the office of the public protector, asking that Madonsela look into Zuma’s use of state money.
As the journalists’ allotted three hours with the documents came to an end, Madonsela entered the room. Everyone jumped up to push cameras and recorders in front of her, hungry for comment. Exceedingly self-possessed, Madonsela, who is 52, has a deliberative air that projects both utter confidence and nervous shyness, depending on the moment. She explained how she came to find — through interviews with public-works and police officials, contractors and Zuma himself, along with a review of “voluminous documents” — that the president misappropriated government funds and violated the state ethics code. Zuma, she said, did not stop his architect and other service providers from freely piling up costs and potentially diverting funds while finishing the project, which also included underground bunkers, a security fence, a cattle kraal, a swimming pool and an amphitheater. Ultimately, the renovations at Zuma’s compound cost taxpayers roughly $20 million.
After taking questions, Madonsela announced the remedial actions her office would pursue. “I am requesting the president take steps, with the assistance of the National Treasury and the South African Police Service, to determine the reasonable cost of the measures implemented by D.P.W. [Department of Public Works] at his private residence that do not relate to security,” she said. The room tensed. She also wanted Zuma to pay the people of South Africa back the money.
Madonsela was anxious. “I knew what I had done was just,” she said later. “It was a question of the way I had presented my decision. Was it persuasive enough?” The 2014 general election was less than two months away, and Madonsela feared that her investigation would be seen as politically motivated. Zuma’s party, the governing African National Congress, was already claiming as much. “I experienced crazy things with the security cluster trying to stop the investigation,” Madonsela told me. The police minister threatened to arrest her if she released the report, saying it would constitute a breach of Zuma’s security. Various A.N.C. government ministers held news conferences or gave interviews dismissing her past findings against them. Church leaders, who traditionally aligned themselves with the A.N.C., demanded that demons be cast out of her office over a separate investigation she was leading into the affairs of an executive at the state-owned media company.
Madonsela was appointed South Africa’s public protector by Zuma himself in 2009 and is used to controversy. Many of the thousands of cases her office handles each year are resolved through mediation, but about a fifth are “very difficult” cases, including the investigation she is now conducting into the possible diversion of funds meant for Nelson Mandela’s funeral. None, however, have been as divisive as her investigation of Zuma.
After Madonsela released the Nkandla report, she was accused of acting as a covert agent for the Central Intelligence Agency; carrying out an agenda on behalf of the mostly white opposition Democratic Alliance party; acting as she if were God; being racist toward A.N.C. voters; and overreaching her office’s powers. The Congress of South African Students, an anti-apartheid black student organization, said her nose was ugly (it later retracted the statement). Her staff tried to hide the hate-spewing anonymous letters that arrived from around the country. She could ignore most of the vitriol, she said, except for the accusation that she was a C.I.A. agent, made by the deputy minister of defense, Kebby Maphatsoe. “I was sad that people would stoop that low,” she said, shaking her head. “It was the saddest moment of my career. That is the A.N.C. that I grew up loving.”
The A.N.C. holds a great deal of emotional sway over South Africans; it is the party of liberation and a powerful draw at the ballot box. The country still has no strong opposition party. The closest contender, the Democratic Alliance, won 22 percent of the vote during the 2014 election, compared with the A.N.C.’s 62 percent. “Sixty-two percent is substantial,” says John Jeffery, the deputy justice minister. “And the issues of Nkandla were known at that point. The public protector’s report was already out. We’ve got to remember how the electorate voted and continues to vote.”
Because of their governing majority, many A.N.C. leaders have acted as though they are beyond scrutiny. Madonsela was calling them to account. “The work here has exposed fault lines in our democracy,” she said. “It’s got people talking about what kind of democracy we have — and what kind of democracy we deserve.”
The A.N.C. has been more than just a political party since leading South Africa out of apartheid in 1991, as part of a tripartite alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party. It became a democratic beacon on the continent: After more than a century of institutional racism, South Africa had a new liberal constitution, new democratic institutions and new economic potential. Nelson Mandela, the country’s first post-apartheid president, was a global icon. But in recent years, the A.N.C. has experienced increasing turmoil. Endless corruption scandals, mishandling of the H.I.V. and AIDS crisis and cronyism have weakened the party and caused some South Africans to wonder whether it is time for another party to try governing. Defenders contend that criticism of successive A.N.C. governments is rooted in bigotry, that white holders of private wealth — in mining, farming and the media — tend to paint the public sector, which is dominated by blacks, as hopelessly corrupt and inefficient.
The president is at the heart of this tension. Zuma devoted his life to the fight for freedom, helping to lead A.N.C. branches and committees and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and was imprisoned for 10 years for his activities. When the A.N.C. took power, Mandela appointed him to a provincial post. He has since been the subject of several corruption investigations, eluding rape, racketeering, money-laundering and fraud charges. He was dismissed as deputy president by Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s second post-apartheid president, after his financial adviser was convicted in 2005 of procuring a bribe from a French arms manufacturer.
Zuma has managed to retain support among the electorate by portraying himself as a savior of the rural poor and their traditions. It is a platform that resonates with black voters, who remain disproportionately poor. Most of the country’s fertile land is still owned by a few thousand white commercial farmers, while tens of thousands of black farmers crowd on near-barren land. Some of this is because the apartheid government started to privatize many of the state’s assets — roads, rail and the national airline — in the years before it fell, weakening federal power before blacks took over. Then, as now, cheap black labor provided the engine of these industries, especially the immensely profitable mineral-extraction sector.
The A.N.C. has made some tangible changes. It has built millions of houses, increased access to electricity and running water and created an expansive social-welfare program. Average incomes have grown over the past two decades. “The lives of the bottom 20 percent have changed since apartheid,” says Jonny Steinberg, a South African professor in the African studies department at Oxford who has written about the country’s transition to democracy. “And all of these changes have been delivered directly by the state.”
Nevertheless, Zuma’s administration has failed to create enough jobs, effectively redistribute land that was illegally taken from blacks or invest in infrastructure like new power plants. The country is suffering through rolling blackouts as demand outstrips supply. Economic growth has slowed to less than 5 percent, and the rand is falling. Worst of all, unemployment is more than 25 percent, and youth unemployment is at 50 percent. On the local level, corruption is even more widespread than it is nationally. State funds regularly disappear into politicians’ pockets, and residents are forced to stage protests for access to running water, electricity and better schools and clinics. To be heard, protesters often resort to burning down schools, government buildings and whatever else they can seize.
“Poor people are talking about the government in a sharp, critical way for the first time,” Steinberg says, “connecting unemployment and electricity blackouts to bad governance.” That discontent has increased the appeal of opposition leaders like the fiery Julius Malema, once the president of the A.N.C. Youth League and now the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, whose members, dressed in red worker overalls and maid outfits, denounce corruption in the A.N.C.
Zwelinzima Vavi, a former general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, says the “trappings of power” have poisoned the government. “South African democracy is under threat from a gang of ‘tenderpreneurs’ who seek to build instant wealth using the power they have and the control they hold over the state,” Vavi says, referring to officials who enrich themselves through corrupt tenders, or contracts. “These will be people who have grown very powerful because of the patronage networks they have set up. If we can’t stop this, it seems we will be marching slowly but surely toward a building of a kleptocracy.” (The Zuma administration did not respond to repeated requests for comment on these allegations, but said it has “come out hard on any acts of corruption, particularly within the Public Service.”)
The year before Madonsela took office, becoming the third public protector in the nation’s history and the first woman to hold the post, the office handled just over 19,000 cases. Five years later, that number had doubled. “We’ve had other public protectors before her, and all of them were pretty soft with government,” Justice Malala, a political analyst in Johannesburg, told me. “She comes along and starts taking on power and saying, ‘This just isn’t right.’ The Zuma case actually gave the office prominence and stature in the popular mind. It’s restored the idea that there’s someone fighting for the little man and woman in a village somewhere.”
But the reception of the Nkandla report wasn’t what Madonsela expected. “The behavior of some people last year was strange,” she said later, still in disbelief. Many of her comrades abandoned her. They continued to argue that Zuma made only essential security upgrades. During the 1990s, when the rivalry between the A.N.C. and the Inkatha Freedom Party over resources, land and political power turned violent, Zuma’s compound was invaded many times. Just days before the 2014 election, Zuma revealed that during one such breach, one of his wives had been raped. What else was the president to do?
Still, South Africans had complained to Madonsela about the president’s extravagances, and it was her duty to look into them. The Constitution allows her to “take appropriate remedial action” — usually directives that Parliament, the presidency or the courts are expected, though not required, to follow. That was what happened when Madonsela investigated Sicelo Shiceka, a former cooperative governance and traditional affairs minister, for the excessive use of state funds for travel, and then Hlaudi Motsoeneng, the chief operating officer of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, for falsified educational credentials and unjustified salary increases. Zuma fired Shiceka, and a court suspended Motsoeneng.
When Madonsela wrote to Zuma last August asking him to act on her recommendations, he declared that Parliament would ultimately decide his fate. He did not address Madonsela’s question about how taxpayer money had been apportioned, nor did he explain why he previously claimed that he had paid for the upgrades himself. Instead, he ordered his police minister, Nkosinathi Nhleko, to determine if any money needed to be paid back. Nhleko issued his own report at the end of May, absolving Zuma. He claimed that the swimming pool was an essential “fire pool,” that the cattle kraal was an area of important cultural and spiritual value that also aided in security and that the amphitheater was an assembly area in case of emergency.
In August 2014, five months after Madonsela’s report was released, Parliament created a committee to consider the charges but did not call any witnesses or interview the president. Opposition members resigned from the committee in protest, which left it with a membership drawn entirely from the A.N.C. The committee decided that Zuma did not benefit from the upgrades to his private home and blamed public-works officials for the excessive spending. Zuma, it said, was simply unaware of the misuse of funds.
Today, many within the A.N.C. believe that the public protector’s report was politically motivated. Khaya Xaba, a spokesman for the Young Communist League, a wing of the South African Communist Party, sees Madonsela as inherently biased. “We feel that she’s compromised, we feel that she’s now serving the agenda of the liberals,” he told me, referring to the Democratic Alliance, which, along with the other opposition parties, mostly supports Madonsela’s scrutiny of government officials. (She spoke at a Democratic Alliance women’s event in 2012 but otherwise has no association with the party.) Xaba, who is young and heavyset with tattoos covering his arms, was disappointed by the way Madonsela released the Nkandla report to the news media. “Was she trying to be some rock star?” he asked. “Or some Jesus or some messiah? We believe she’s been targeting the president.” Jeffery, the deputy justice minister, agrees. “She’s not a judicial or quasi-judicial body,” he says, adding that her report “gets put into the public domain for people then to argue whether she’s right or whether she’s not right.” Jeffery believed that Madonsela wanted to enforce her own recommendations, which he said is illegal under the Constitution. “Who guards against the public protector?” he asked.
Zuma apparently intends to. His maneuvering around Madonsela’s report has thrown the power of her office into question. But South Africans have since rallied around her. “She’s doing something that is not easy to do,” said Refilwe Mokhasipe, a young woman in Johannesburg. “She’s brave. We need people like her around, to bring order to the country. I love my president, but let him do the right thing for once. It’s unfortunate that she has to be crucified for doing the right thing.” There are several Facebook pages devoted to her. Bongi Bangeni, a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town, says: “There hasn’t been someone whom young black women can look up to. I think Thuli offers that hope.” She went on: “Everyone is singing her praises, from the young to the old, across the color boundary, black, white. Everyone is saying in public, ‘Good job, well done.’ That shows as a nation we’re tired, we’re fed up.”
“I’m not some African warrior princess,” Madonsela told me in February while sitting in her office in Pretoria, a capital city of midrise government buildings and bland housing developments. She is simultaneously steely and gentle-mannered. Dressed that day in a green blouse and a dark blazer, she exuded a glamorous calm. But when Parliament interrogates her about why she chooses to pursue certain cases or complains that she demands that her decisions be enforced, she sometimes visibly bristles, asserting that it is not her duty to answer to lawmakers or anyone else. She sees the role of the public protector as above the petty politics of governance.
Madonsela rises early, usually before dawn, to review reports of the cases her teams are handling and then goes for a walk to clear her head. When she returns home, she meditates and prays and then checks email and Twitter. She has more than 166,000 followers on Twitter, where she asks about the state of the country and shares motivational thoughts (“I often wonder what we would lose if we disagreed without name-calling, if we simply improved the quality of our arguments. #TheWorldIYearnFor”). They tweet back their admiration or frustration or, as one man did, offer unsolicited advice on her hairstyle (“I see the weave is gone . . . Hallelujah . . . LOL”).
Born in Johannesburg, a sprawling metropolis of sleek highways woven around high-walled homes, cramped shantytowns and shimmering shopping malls, Madonsela grew up as one of five siblings in the township of Soweto. Her mother was a maid and her father an electrician who later started a communal taxi business. Madonsela’s parents sent her to neighboring Swaziland so she could receive an education outside apartheid-era black schools. “In the township, the role models we had were teachers and nurses,” she recalled. Her father wanted her to be a nurse, but she chose law, and he refused to pay for her studies. A rigorous student, she persisted and secured a scholarship. (Madonsela had a weakness for comic books in her earlier years, though. She would hide them inside her textbooks in class when she grew bored.)
While an undergraduate, she started working with the black trade-union movement. She wanted to do what she could to help black workers organize in white-run industries. The police often went to the family home in Soweto looking for her and her brother Musa, an anti-apartheid activist. After the ban on the A.N.C. was lifted and the party was voted into power, Madonsela provided the A.N.C. with legal advice. She was also enlisted as a technical consultant when the country’s post-apartheid Constitution was being finalized, working on drafting the Bill of Rights and on reconciling the right to equality with cultural, religious and customary rights. “It was once-in-a-lifetime,” she said of the experience. “It was quite exciting.”
When Zuma appointed Madonsela public protector in 2009, she was working as a lawyer with the South African Law Reform Commission, an independent organization that works with Parliament and local legislatures on legal issues. The search for a new public protector is designed to include people outside the government. Parliament solicits nominations from the public, and then a parliamentary committee interviews a shortlist of candidates and recommends one person to the president. For Madonsela, the job felt like an extension of her lifelong fight for human rights.
“I was particularly concerned about the ordinary administrative wrongs against ordinary people,” she told me. “I wanted to position the office so that any gogo dlamini, any old lady, in the middle of nowhere in South Africa knows where to go when they feel they’ve been wronged by the state.” Madonsela pursued high-profile cases like “Guptagate,” in which a wealthy Indian family close to Zuma was allowed to land a private plane carrying wedding guests at a military base, as well as smaller injustices. She corrected a shortage of workbooks at an Eastern Cape school and helped several whistle-blowers receive back wages and reclaim their jobs. “You feel a real sense of gratitude, honestly,” she said, “if somebody was fired wrongly, and for the last five years they’ve had no income, they have lost their house and they did not know where to go, and they finally ended up here, and we got them their jobs back.”
Her willingness to take on big cases has sometimes put her at personal risk. In 2011, she investigated Bheki Cele, the national police commissioner at the time, over inflated contracts for properties the police service was leasing. “I thought that maybe she should resign, because it was getting not only personal but bordering along the lines of danger,” says her brother Musa, who runs construction and consulting businesses in Soweto. He heard some young men saying that his sister was troublesome and that they needed to get rid of her. (Zuma eventually fired Cele for unjustly awarding the contracts.)
Madonsela believes that her sex has also made her work more difficult. Parliament condemned her for her salary, saying it was too high, even though her male predecessor made the same amount. “I have felt the way some of the people talk down to me,” she told me in February. “It’s race, it’s gender, it’s age. There’s internalized racism by black people themselves, who would feel, ‘I can take an order from a white person, I can take orders from a male, but really I’m not used to taking orders from a black woman.’ It’s like watching some of the American slave movies, where the house slave determines that it is his duty to protect the master and won’t even ask what needs to be done. They will be even more ruthless than the master himself in trying to gain favor with the master. Some of the people really have gone there.” She stopped, faltering. “I don’t think the president authorized people to go around calling me a spy.”
To Madonsela’s shock, the country’s State Security Agency said in March that it is conducting an investigation into the claims that she is a C.I.A. agent. When she visited Parliament in late April to ask for an expanded budget — she said her office had settled 21,170 of 29,303 recent cases but required more staff members — the A.N.C. chairman of a parliamentary justice committee, Mathole Motshekga, said she had “become a law unto herself” and wasted taxpayer money. Later the committee told her that she must now report to it four times a year, as opposed to the usual two required of the other Chapter Nine offices.
All of this, says Malala, the political analyst in Johannesburg, reflects how difficult it is to change the country’s political culture. “How often in the life of a nation do people go for the president of the country on the basis that he spent $20 million on himself?” he says. “Madonsela is doing the best with the resources she’s got. But as long as she’s going after the big fish, there will be attempts to cut her down.”
One evening in Cape Town this February, when it was still light and warm, residents looked up at the sky in annoyance as military helicopters hovered over the compact city between the misty mountains and the sea, announcing Zuma’s arrival at the Houses of Parliament for the annual State of the Nation address. A red carpet, photographers and police officers on horseback greeted attendees in formal attire, including Madonsela, who wore a pink-and-red gown. After the speech, there was to be a gala cocktail party and dinner at a cost of almost $400,000 to taxpayers. But most of the opposition politicians wouldn’t make it to the event. As soon as Zuma began his address, he was interrupted by an Economic Freedom Fighters member wanting to know how he would pay back the money for his home renovations — by bank transfer or perhaps by another method? The Assembly speaker ordered the E.F.F. parliamentarians to leave. When they refused, a chaotic brawl broke out between the E.F.F. members, dressed as usual in workers’ and maids’ outfits, and a security team that swept into the room. The security officers dragged the lawmakers through the door. A.N.C. members cheered, and Zuma laughed. The Democratic Alliance walked out in protest.
I found Madonsela in the public protector’s office in downtown Cape Town the next afternoon. With her manicured nails and delicate jewelry, she looked as if she had just come from the previous night’s event. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “There was a time when I felt like crying, but I never had tears.” She spoke slowly, turning over her words. “There was a sense of confusion. I had deep sadness.” The fighting was painful to watch, but she thought it had woken people up. “Yesterday became a catalyst,” she said. A debate was raging over whether the government unconstitutionally allowed police officers into Parliament, but she thought that was beside the point. The situation had to get worse so everyone would understand that after the Nkandla report, things couldn’t just go back to the way they were until the president owned up to wrongdoing. “Somebody had to raise the accountability question,” she said. She just wished the confrontation wasn’t on a day when the world was watching and would think that South Africa had become a banana republic.
At the end of May, Madonsela publicly reconsidered her approach to the president. She said that if she were to do it again, she would have used stronger language in her judgment. She now says that Zuma benefited improperly and unlawfully, not just unduly, from the security upgrades; it’s a distinction that suggests criminality. It took her more than a year to reach this new position, a risky one, after enduring personal and professional attacks that have left her office crippled. She has 160 corruption cases that have been outstanding for more than a year and doesn’t have the resources to hire even contract investigators to tackle the backlog.
The case against Zuma drags on. The Special Investigating Unit is now suing his architect for damages, putting the exorbitant expenses on him. Madonsela still calls herself an optimist, a believer in the country’s democratic project, despite the entrenched resistance to her work. She plans to write another letter to Zuma, she said, imploring him to heed her report. It’s unclear, though, if anyone will be listening.
Copyright 2015 New York Times
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