The Office of the Public Protector will have to fork out as much as R15 million this financial year for costs incurred by the embattled Busisiwe Mkhwebane, to defend the impeachment proceedings instituted against her. Not to mention the costs orders that the Office incurred, during her reign, on reports that were successfully challenged (which are more than I care to count).

Up until last week, Mkhwebane’s legal team consisted of Adv Dali Mpofu SC, two junior counsel and two attorneys, with the legal costs amounting to as much as R130 000 a day for Dali Mpofu alone. In addition to that, the Office of the Public Protector has established that there was some overbilling by Mkhwebane’s legal team. Mpofu has made a career out of representing embattled public figures such as Peter Moyo, as well as public servants such as Jacob Zuma and Tom Moyane, without winning a single case - all paid for by you and I with our tax money. Mpofu is also the same counsel who, on behalf of the Office of the Public Protector, applied for a rescission of the Constitutional Court’s decision on rescission.

It is time that we put an end to the frivolous spending of our hard earned money on political legal battles. We’ve come to learn as South Africans that it’s easy to spend money that isn’t yours. For that reason we demand the following:

1. That the budget for legal expenditure for the Office of the Public Protector be capped at R5 million.
2. To prevent further frivolous litigation or abuse of court process, a policy should also be put in place that requires a sitting or acting Public Protector to pay 10% of the total legal costs for a lost case. This amount is to be docked from the Public Protector’s salary and returned to the Office’s budget.

First the Office of the Public Protector - next the rest of the Chapter 9 institutions, state departments and state owned enterprises!