Just when it seems South Africa cannot fall further from grace, daily we are proved wrong.
The other day a paramedic from a private ambulance service was involved in an attack by another ambulance worker.
In July this year the Advertiser reported on two ambulances that were decommissioned because members of the community in Reiger Park and Ramaphosa informal settlement, respectively, had attacked them.
This was not an isolated incident of emergency personnel being attacked in Boksburg. William Ntladi, spokesperson for Ekurhuleni Disaster and Emergency Management Services, in reaction to the latest incident, pleaded with the public not to attack emergency personnel.
Recently in Johannesburg it was reported that ambulances would be escorted by the police when on call-out to certain locations, out of fear of being attacked.
This is the country we live in – where emergency personnel fear for their lives, not only from the community but also from rival ambulance services.
But wait, the fall from grace continues with the saga of Public Protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane, who took over from the very competent Thuli Madonsela.
Mkhwebane has been in hot water of late for her investigations into Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan and President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The president recently held an extra-ordinary media briefing where he announced that he would seek an urgent legal review of Mkhwebane’s report on a R500 000 donation to his ANC presidential election campaign.
It is understandable one would get excited when seeing large sums of money flowing into the ANC presidential bid, but the problem is that it seems the public protector turned suspicion into fact.
She suggested Ramaphosa personally benefited from the money donated through a trust, yet it would appear the president was neither a trustee nor a registered personal beneficiary.
There are also talks of the report being flawed because the CR17 campaign was a party-political campaign (Ramaphosa was campaigning to be president of the ANC, not the country). After all, you could be president of a governing party and choose not to stand for election during the first sitting of the National Assembly as president of the republic.
Ramaphosa lambasted the public protector’s findings, saying his decision to seek a judicial review of the report is motivated by a determination that the law should be applied correctly and consistently.
What is comical is that the public protector is appointed by the president on the recommendation of the National Assembly in terms of the Constitution for a non-renewable period of seven years.
So yes, Mr President, you appointed the public protector, so if her findings are flawed, then certainly the appointment was flawed, which raises a lot of other questions about such important appointments.
The public protector is appointed following intense scrutiny and narrowing down of numerous potential candidates. How on earth was she then appointed if her office has so dramatically failed? And who will ever again put their faith in the public protector’s office?
The Office of the Public Protector is there to assist citizens to hold those in power accountable for their improper conduct. So if such an office fails to apply the law correctly, then one fears South Africa is in very deep trouble.
And while the president has stressed that neither he nor the public protector is above the law, this entire incident has raised plenty of questions about accountability and proper governance.
Consider that SA’s highest court also recently delivered the most damning, and potentially career-ending, ruling yet against a public protector, in which it described Mkhwebane’s conduct in investigating and defending her SA Reserve Bank report as flawed and characterised by bad faith and dishonesty.
The saga of the public protector is, sadly, the same scenario of poor governance that is evident in the bankruptcy of state-owned enterprise (SOE), bankruptcies that have been caused by poor management, incompetency and terrible maladministration.
Every citizen of this country, and right here in Boksburg, is affected because the government keeps bailing out the SOEs with taxpayers’ money.
The only good thing we have going for this country is Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng. The rest is a sorry state of affairs where nothing is sacred, nothing can be trusted, nothing makes sense and nowhere is safe.
