South Africa's newly appointed public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane disapproves of littering and potbellies on men.
NEWS ANALYSIS
She is worried about rhino poaching and she holidays in Venice. She has a slightly suspicious taste in shoes, and a predilection for beauty products based on aloe vera. Her flavour of Christianity is distinctly Pentecostal and she disapproves of potbellies on men.
Other things she disapproves of include littering and – probably, though not certainly – massive state spending on Nkandla as well as members of Parliament who failed to impeach the president the last time around.
These are the secrets hidden behind the “private” setting of new public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s five-year-old Twitter account, the privacy of which became another point of criticism this week. Just what, journalists wondered, did she have to hide behind that seldom-used Twitter setting?
The answer turned out to be as boring as the woman it portrays: middle-class sentiments only barely more predictable than they are banal – and nothing to suggest a crony of President Jacob Zuma out to destroy the legacy left by her predecessor, Thuli Madonsela.
If anything, a review of Mkhwebane’s long-standing private Twitter account, @busisiwe02, shows, it is the ANC that should be worried about what she might do with the vast powers she will wield over the next seven years.
“I was looking forward to come back to SA, but it’s disappointing to find indecisiveness of some people in positions of power,” Mkhwebane, then a civil servant of a much more ordinary kind in the department of home affairs, tweeted to her small private following in mid-2014.
It was one of the few opinions she expressed directly and in her own words, but her choice of reading matter and retweets suggests a sometimes pointed disappointment. “Those #MPs who chose not to #ImpeachZuma and showed the #Constitution the middle finger and voted to keep him,” was the caption to a list compiled by an Inkatha Freedom Party MP and retweeted by Mkhwebane in April.
The many pro-Zuma arguments at the time about why the president had not broken his oath of office by allowing the waste of state resources at his rural home do not feature at all on Mkhwebane’s timeline.
As was the case for many South Africans, Mkhwebane’s interest in Nkandla peaked at two points. When her predecessor released the now famous report Secure in Comfort in 2014, Mkhwebane looked first at a breakdown of the way state money was spent to benefit Zuma.
Over the course of the next week, as the report was closely analysed, she retweeted a comment that held: “Under the National Party we had Apartheid but under the ANC we experience Coruptheid”. She also helped spread a graphic that showed how the R246-million spent on Nkandla could have been better applied, such as by building about 2 900 low-cost homes.
She later followed that with a link to a news article on former president Kgalema Motlanthe’s call on government to implement Madonsela’s recommendations.
The government failed to implement the recommendations until the Constitutional Court ordered Zuma to repay some the money spent on Nkandla. That judgment saw Mkhwebane interrupt her usual fare of retweets of car hijacking reports and inspirational quotes to note Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s description of the public protector as a “biblical David facing the Goliath”.
On the weekend Mkhwebane advised the 173 people allowed to see her tweets to use a new, formal and public account, @AdvBMkhwebane. That account almost immediately followed the official accounts of Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane and Economic Freedom Front leader Julius Malema – but not before following the most banal of all celebrities, Kim Kardashian West.