Pretoria - The Head of the Public Protector’s Free State Office, Sphelo Samuel, has told the Parliament’s Section 194 Committee that suspended Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, protected politicians on the Estina Dairy Farm scandal.
Samuel was speaking on Wednesday in the inquiry into the fitness of Mkhwebane to hold office.
He is the second witness to make the claim.
Last week, a former public protector investigator, Tebogo Kekana testified that Mkhwebane allegedly ordered that findings against politicians should be removed from the Estina report.
“We were forced to remove adverse findings in the report including on premier (Ace Magashule) and agriculture MEC (Mosebenzi Zwane),” Kekana said at the time.
Kekana said Mkhwebane indicated that she did not care whether the Vrede dairy report was taken on review or not.
To add on Kekana’s testimony, Samuel who was also involved in the Estina investigation, said before the Estina report was released, Mkhwebane met with Magashule in private for 15 to 20 minutes while he waited for her in the waiting area.
He added that he was not privy of the details Mkhwebane and Magashule spoke about.
Samuel said he did not add or make any input on the final report as he felt it was inadequate and felt strongly that politicians who were implicated, should be mentioned.
He said the final report stated that certain issues were not investigated due to financial and capacity constraints.
He disputed these claims.
“I was never of the view that the investigation was particularly inflicted by such constraints and neither, to my knowledge, were any other investigators from the provincial office.
“In some instances, we consulted experts, but this was done for free. For example, during March 2013 and April 2017 we consulted the SA Holstein Breeders’ Association for assistance in determining certain values.”
Samuel said that from 2017, a year after Mkhwebane took over, the office began significantly cutting its costs.
He said this was due to “reckless” litigation that Mkhwebane pursued specifically in relation to the CIEX and Estina report.
Both reports were taken to court and Mkhwebane received scathing judgments for compiling substandard reports.
She tried fighting the judgment through the Constitutional Court but her applications were dismissed.
Samuel said as most of the budget was spent on Mkhwebane’s legal battles, a lot of departments suffered.
He said community outreach programmes conducted by the public protector reduced significantly.
“The outreach clinics were an important way of ensuring that communities - even those in far-flung, disconnected or rural areas, could use the services of the office of the public protector to ensure accountability in the public administration... achieving accessibility required expanding our footprint through initiatives such as the outreach clinics.”
Not only outreach programmes were affected, even conducting investigations was severely compromised.
“Vehicles were grounded, they couldn’t be driven anywhere... Travelling was not allowed. It literally stopped. We effectively did our investigations from our offices... We couldn’t go and do inspections or meet with complainants,” Samuel said.
He added that funding that was previously available for training was no longer available. Even training that had no cost was stopped, which to him, affected the quality of reports.
After he was not satisfied with Mkhwebane’s administration, he wrote a “friendly” letter asking her to resign.
The day after he requested Mkhwebane to resign, Samuel said he was blocked from accessing his work emails.
He said after that, he was allegedly targeted by Mkhwebane and was accused of assault that occurred in 2011 where the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) had declined to prosecute the matter.
However in 2017, the case against was reinstated after the complainant complained to the National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP).
Samuel said he was found guilty of common assault and received a suspended sentence, however, he has made an appeal and the matter is still to be heard.
Mkhwebane later suspended him on misconduct and said he also made disparaging remarks about the public protector.
However, he was reinstated after he took the matter to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA).
Samuel will continue with his testimony on Thursday.
IOL