Professor Temba Sono
Image: File
SA is currently witnessing proceedings in several public hearings, including two interesting but contrasting ones.
The parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee to Investigate Allegations by Lt-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi under the chairmanship of the avuncular ANC's Soviet Lekganyane held in Cape Town is one. The second is the Madlanga Commission formally known as the Commission of Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System held in Pretoria.
These two similar but contrasting commissions deal with one socio-political disease which has infected like a virulent virus our beloved country since 1994: political, police, prosecutorial, judicial and bureaucracy's venality, as well as the nefarious and intrusive interposition of private sector robber barons.
The writer says that the Ad Hoc Committee investigating allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi displays an atrocious lack of skills in evidence extraction from witnesses.
Image: Armand Hough / Independent Newspapers
These two commissions are like day and night. One occasionally descends to juvenile antics coloured spectacularly by school boy bullying tactics, political posturing, party upmanship, and even display of embarrassing amateurishness. This Ad Hoc Committee displays an atrocious lack of skills in evidence extraction from witnesses.
Screaming, throwing temper tantrums and insults, fabricating claims of a witness seeking to overthrow the government without the temerity of presenting a shred of evidence. It is one thing to say a person is a thug, a thief, a looter, a seditious scoundrel, a White supremacist, a spy, etc. But is quite another to present evidence buttressing such charges.
As Julius Malema often say: it is dololo. He too must present evidence. Or, it is dololo. I once accused MP Vincent Smith of being a crook while I was in the Legislature. Look at him today in the front page of the Sowetan behind bars like a caged animal. The Court has supported my age-old claims that Smith is a crook. I knew it then.
The Ad Hoc Committee need also to provide evidence in its Final Report to Parliament that SA indeed has a spy, a seditious insurgent who has been here for more than 40 years seeking to overthrow a government that he has been sedulously supporting, and who is also a White Supremacist.
SA has of course many White supremacists as Malema correctly points out when he makes charges of White Supremacists in public utterances. In Parliament however he must not hide behind parliamentary privileges and immunities as he is exempt from accusations of slander, defamation and simple thuggery. He has to provide evidentiary proof of Paul O' Sullivan being such and not merely make inferential extrapolations.
Similarly, the likes of cantankerous MP Dereleen James who throws erratic and endless ad hominen like confetti at a wedding ceremony, with which she seeks to justify spurious allegations by fake documentary evidence.
The Madlanga Commission, on the other hand, is a podium of seasoned jurists who are thoroughly skilled in extracting evidence. The meticulously penetrative Adv. Sesi Baloyi, the carefully crafting but incisively cutting knife of Commissioner Khumalo, just like Judge Mbuyiseli Madlanga who with his avuncular smile still cuts through the bull nonsense of seemingly devious and crooked witnesses.
Judge Madlanga should not have retired from the Bench but requirements compelled him to, unlike those in the US who could remain on the benches until in their 80s. Our judiciary has a number scoundrels some of whom have been debarred, while others are in court answering to embarrassing charges. Still others are being investigated for alleged breach of the law. One even appears before his colleagues for chasing women skirts in stead of focusing on the business of judicial adjudication.
SA is in a sorry state, even though we have a minority of wonderful citizens, of whom I have no space to cite them. But SA has also deviants galore in parliament, the executive, the judiciary, water boards, Lotto Commission, municipalities, provincial governments, SANDF, SAPS Correctional Services, universities, churches, taxi ranks, trade unions, school boards, school teachers, etc. Hey the country bleeds in the number of scoundrels and vagabonds populating both the private sector and the public service space.
Professor Themba Sono is a former MPL of the Gauteng legislature. He also taught at various universities in the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa as well as Taiwan. His views do not represent those of the Sunday Tribune or IOL.