What is Busisiwe Mkhwebane trying to do?

I can’t imagine a situation when somebody gets a klap in the form of a public protector report and responds with, “This public protector’s office, which is predominantly black, is persecuting me.”

I wonder how Busi Mkhwebane would have responded to that hypothetical.

We know that she’s happy to dish it out but why? What does it benefit her cause to place that phrasing into her argument? Is she alluding to an Indian cabal against her?

Apology not sticking

Either we must believe she’s stupid and that statement was just a bad call, or we need to believe she had a reason to drop that little quip.

Her apology is also stupid, or at least it assumes we are.

We are expected to believe there was no intention to attack people based on their race with a statement that went out of its way to mention race.

It’s easy to back yourself by being dismissive of the elements against you. It would be more ideal for the now uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party MP to engage with the elements against her.

I’m not sure whether there’s an element in MK that believes we just break things and then rebuild them in the way we want to but it seems like it’s becoming more and more of that.

From the idea of collapsing the constitutional order to frustrating the Judicial Service Commission, it’s becoming an apparent modus operandi.

It can’t be said that MK want to keep anything remotely close to how they are, and they have a wild way of dealing with that.

ALSO READ: ‘Self-evidently dead on arrival’: SCA dismisses Mkhwebane’s ‘frivolous’ appeal on Section 194

A bone to pick

So you get Mkhwebane, who was a massive cog in the democratic machine and didn’t do a great job of it. So little of a great job that she didn’t survive the previous parliament.

Talking about somebody who has a bone to pick with the previous parliament, they also got the factor of former Western Cape judge president and MK leader in parliament John Hlophe. One can start to see the methodology.

It’s worrying that there’s an increase of people who have failed the state in important roles, gone through several loops to try to defend themselves with little justification and eventually getting kicked out.

It’s even more concerning that after frustrating the democratic mechanisms of the state to such an extent, they then complain the system is against them.

It’s most concerning that there’s an increasing number of the population accepting that narrative based on personality.

As those narratives gain traction, it could cause serious ruptures in a well-considered system. The system is by no means perfect but simply changing it to suit some personalities is not the way to patch the holes.

ALSO READ: Calls for investigation into Mkhwebane’s alleged racial ‘slurs’

Brain power

We need to spend time and brain power considering objections. Time and brain power don’t seem to be in surplus within the resources of the MK war chest.

Why bother engaging in professional debate to improve the state when you can get your way by breaking things and building them back up?

Should we be worried? Maybe, if one is convinced that the building-up will happen. The saving grace is that I’ve not known any of those personalities to build anything.

A telling sign will be checking where Mkhwebane, Hlophe and their friends are in the next five years.

If they struggle to build themselves, we won’t have much issue with what they try to build in the country.

We still have to make sure that it doesn’t break.

NOW READ: Mkhwebane apologises if ‘Indian descent’ remarks came across as racial slur [VIDEO]