Let us first dispense with the uncontested. Legal fees are expensive. The best lawyers charge a pretty penny and if anyone, including the state or those who act in its name, want their expertise, they must be prepared to pay.
With that out of the way, we must say it is unconscionable that the public protector has used more than R147m paying lawyers.
To put this in context, the parliamentary hearing to assess public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s fitness for office has been told that in the 2016/17 financial year, about half (R6.4m) of the R13m set aside for legal fees was spent.
Mkhwebane started work as the public protector in October 2016.
In the 2019/2020 period, there was an over-expenditure of R48m on legal fees.
Evidence at the hearing showed that between 2016 and 2022, R147m of the R159m set aside for professional and consulting services constituted legal fees.
Mkhwebane has so far spent more than R67m of her office’s budget on legal costs to defend public protector decisions taken on judicial review and on trying to stop her impeachment.
The public protector perennially complains of being cashed-strapped. In its annual performance plan document for 2021/22, the office complained that “a reduced budget has dire consequences for the institution. Among other things, such a state of affairs poses a threat to an already inadequate human resource capacity, which in turn affects the quality of investigations and time-frames of resolution of matters negatively”.
Mkhwebane must look at the woman in the mirror to get answers for why the office is not able to perform the functions expected of it.
Equally concerning is what seems to be a small coterie of legal and other professionals who have benefited from most of the office’s need for legal and other advice.
It is inescapable. Many of these lawyers and other professional service providers have in the past represented and politically associated themselves with former president Jacob Zuma or the Radical Economic Transformation lobby within the ANC.
We emphasise that we cast no aspersions on their qualifications and right to offer and charge what they did. This is, however, not Mkhwebane’s own money. It belongs to the taxpayer and every rand spent needs to be properly accounted for. We trust that this exercise will be performed and answers publicly shared.
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