Dear Editor
Acting Public Protector, Adv Koleka Gcaleka’s report on allegations of a violation of the Executive Members Ethics Act by President Cyril Ramaphosa pertaining to a theft at his farm at Phala Phala delivered earlier today, was nothing more than a whitewash of the entire sordid Phala Phala scandal.
Given that Adv Gcaleka is vying for the top job within the Office of the Public Protector, her report today read more like a job interview than a concluded investigation.
By burying the merits of this investigation in legal jargon and semantics, and contorting the law in her interpretation of both the Executive Members Ethics Act and the Constitution, she has attempted to paint President Cyril Ramaphosa as nothing more than an innocent bystander to the Phala Phala scandal, oblivious to the workings of the Presidential Protection Services, his responsibilities as the head of South Africa’s national executive, and his duty as the first citizen of the nation.
This report could only be described as a pro-Ramaphosa public relations exercise.
The Democratic Alliance will be consulting with our lawyers to take this report on review as we believe it contains a number of misinterpretations of the relevant pieces of legislation, and presents a worrying lack of evidence that the Office of the Public Protector itself has seemingly failed to source.
In doing so, Adv Gcaleka has muddied the waters of a matter to which South Africans still do not have any clear answers.
It is also gravely concerning to note the discrepancies between the Nkandla Report, whose interpretation of similar laws found that former President Jacob Zuma was severely compromised as President of the Republic, yet Cyril Ramaphosa is seemingly assessed by different standards.
We will be asking our lawyers to consult the Nkandla Report for any potential legal precedent that can be used to point out the discrepancies in Adv Gcaleka’s findings.
Most worrying in this flawed report is the insidious weakening of South Africa’s institutions as the very last bastions of accountability in our young democracy.
Should the Office of the Public Protector indeed be captured, the DA will work tirelessly to ensure that our democratic institutions are rid of any political influence to ensure that the principles of accountability and equality before the law are always upheld.
Our country’s future depends on them.
Regards
John Steenhuisen MP
Leader of the Democratic Alliance
Green Ghost
Forgive me for being a bit of an idiot but where do I find your newsletter subscription service?
SWAT Honey
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.