Mail & Guardian reporter Govan Whittles takes a satirical look at what’s making headlines.
To his colleagues at the department of public works Sibusiso Chonco is a ghost. It is not a term they use, as they talk in hushed tones reserved for death. But a ghost is what they describe: one who is no longer of their world but not departed from it either.
He frightens them because he represents proof that they, too, can one day find themselves stuck in limbo if they fail to follow arcane rules that are never explained.
“I don’t want to see him. But then I feel bad because I don’t want him to be gone,” says one colleague, before reminiscing about the man Chonco used to be — even though he is sitting in a nearby room.
Not all that long ago Chonco was just a deputy director for the department of public works’s Durban office. Then the department decided to shift most of the responsibility for “Prestige Project A” from its national office in Pretoria to Durban.
The need for secrecy dictated that the fewer people involved the better, officials would later explain, and proximity to the site of the work also recommended the delegation.
And so Chonco came to be one of a dozen or so technocrats who directed a river of money — about R250-million — to be spent on President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla compound.
Multiple investigations have found the upgrades made under the department’s auspices to be in breach of many rules and regulations. To what extent Chonco was personally involved in, and liable for, the Nkandla debacle was due to be determined at a departmental disciplinary hearing this week. But it is hard to put the ghost of a man on trial.
“In my view the employee seems to be genuinely sick,” said the chairperson of that hearing, Thulani Khuzwayo, on Tuesday, before postponing it to July.
It took Khuzwayo 30 minutes to reach that decision.
Throughout, Chonco sat in a corner resting his forehead against the wall, shrunken in on himself. He had trouble remembering the date. At times he trembled so much he could not write legibly.
But his employer, by way of its representative, advocate Clement Kulati, was not buying it. “The employee is just seeking postponement as a matter of a delaying tactic so that the disciplinary hearing does not proceed,” Kulati told Khuzwayo in arguing against the postponement.
“At some point the employer has got a right and a prerogative to discipline its employees, and the delaying tactics of the employees cannot hold the employer to ransom in terms of that prerogative.”
Kulati also argued that the charges Chonco faces, mostly dealing with a failure to follow procurement rules, were well enough documented that a failure of memory on his part need not interrupt proceedings.
This suggestion incensed Chonco’s representative, lawyer Adrian Moodley. “That response shows the employers’ attitude towards these proceedings,” Moodley spat in reply.
Chonco’s union had previously labelled the proceedings against him and nine colleagues in the Nkandla saga as a search for scapegoats.
Moodley said Chonco hoped to maintain his medical privacy, but disclosed that he was under care and on medication, and had consulted a clinical psychologist. In arguing for a postponement Moodley referred to his client’s “depression” and “anxiety”, as well as elevated blood pressure.
Chonco attended the hearing against medical advice, Moodley said.
A colleague who had watched Chonco stumble through the office reception to a boardroom earlier in the day, said: “I remember him as such a strong, strong man.”
Chonco and his colleagues were charged with breaches documented by the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) in 2014. Government employees interviewed had claimed they had been threatened and intimidated into taking certain actions on Nkandla, the SIU said at the time, but the validity of such claims would only be tested during disciplinary hearings.
Both before and after that report, top officials and Cabinet ministers had publicly warned that disclosing details of the Nkandla project could come with a stiff jail term.
Zuma repaid the state R7.8-million for improvements in line with the public protector’s Secure in Comfort report, after the Constitutional Court last year ordered him to do so.
A calculation based on the SIU investigation shows that his family benefited to the tune of R51.5-million.
In the same judgment Zuma was ordered to reprimand the Cabinet ministers involved in Nkandla, including those officials accused of threatening employees with dire consequences if they did not deliver Nkandla improvements in secrecy, and at speed, and to specification. Zuma wrote each a letter that briefly summarised that judgment. “I hereby deliver the reprimand required,” the sharpest part of each letter read.
Moodley said on Tuesday in arguing for the postponement of the disciplinary hearing: “This is Mr Chonco’s employment, this is his vocation. The consequences at their most dire, he may lose his employment.”