No Longer Whispering to Power: The Story of Thuli Madonsela

By Thandeka Gqubule

Thuli Madonsela achieved in seven years as Public Protector what few accomplish in a lifetime; her legacy and contribution cannot be overstated. In her final days in office she compiled the explosive State of Capture report and, two years before that, Secure in Comfort, the report on President Jacob Zuma's Nkandla residence. Praised and vilified in equal measure, Madonsela frequently found herself on centre stage in the increasingly fractious South African political scene. Yet, despite the intense media scrutiny, Madonsela remains something of an enigma. Who is this soft-spoken woman who stood up to state corruption? Where did she develop her views and resolve? In No Longer Whispering to Power Thandeka Gqubule, journalist and one of the 'SABC 8' fired and rehired by the broadcaster, attempts to answer these questions, and others, by exploring aspects of Madonsela's life: her childhood years and family, her involvement in student politics, her time in prison, her contribution to the Constitution, and her life in law.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: May 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781868427321

Thandeka Gqubule

THANDEKA GQUBULE is a veteran journalist who has worked in the media for nearly three decades. She has followed the story of former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela with great dedication and passion.

Book preview

PART I

THE MAKING OF

THULI MADONSELA

PROLOGUE

CROSSING THE MARA RIVER

I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.

– Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

South Africa’s people have been on a protracted journey. It has, indeed, been a long walk to freedom; like Mandela, we have made missteps along the way. The story of Thuli Madonsela is the story of how we came to lose our way on the quest for a just society – and how we tried to find our way back onto the path of progress.

Initially, an air of foreboding suggested a need to move in a different direction – mere stirrings. Sporadic political violence followed – and, then, an avalanche of discontent.

By the end of Thuli Madonsela’s tenure, tens of thousands of reports had been concluded. But, two loomed larger than all others – Secure in Comfort (the Nkandla report) and State of Capture. These two reports played a cataclysmic role in enabling the country’s constitutional democracy to evolve.

During the Mbeki and Zuma administrations, it became clear that, whereas world-class jurisprudence, constitutional engineering and rugged inherited institutions were powerful, they were no match for a determined clique making a concerted attempt to take the resources of the state by storm. The Nkandla report, Secure in Comfort, was a foretaste of what was to come in the State of Capture report. The scale and depth of venality, and the extent to which it had become entrenched in society, was stupendous.

This was rendered more excruciatingly painful by the centuries of deprivation, especially of the African population, that had preceded it. The inequities that the reports exposed brought to mind the statements of Chris Hani, former Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) commander in chief and South Africa’s own Che Guevara. As Hani told Beeld newspaper in 1992, ‘What I fear is that the liberators emerge as elitists […] who drive around in Mercedes Benzes and use the resources of this country […] to live in palaces and to gather riches.’

South Africa had been trying, for some time, to negotiate two tricky transitions simultaneously – the transition required to solve society’s structural economic problems, and a difficult political transition, dogged by the perennial South African race problem. It was unclear whether the newly liberated elite had the stomach, skill, or sense of opportunity to make and execute difficult political and macroeconomic changes concurrently.

Predictably, development performance plunged, along with economic growth. Hunger and anger rose; the ruling elite’s credibility eroded. The project to create a corrupt patrimonial and autocratic state ran into strong headwinds: a surge of political energy emerged, pushing South Africa to the brink.

This energy came from the belly of the social justice movement that had seen many different seasons of battle across the ages. ‘I think we are on the brink of something, and we are at a point where many things have not gone according to the SA constitutional dream […] A lot of things have gone well, but we are at a place where I would say we are in some respects like the children of Israel, lost in the desert. I honestly feel there is a sense of loss,’ Madonsela said in a Financial Mail interview a few days before leaving office.

In a late 2016 SABC television interview, Dirk Kotzé, political science professor at the University of South Africa, said that South Africa was poised on the brink of a transition. ‘The post-Zuma era has begun,’ he said. ‘This is heralded by the state capture report that Thuli Madonsela issued.’ On Twitter, one user called the report ‘Thuli’s final gift to South Africa’; another quoted Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?’

For days after the State of Capture report, statements boldly asserting impunity came from sources close to the president. In response, discontent grew, until the nation seethed with rage.

Clearly, there were many rivers to cross.

The imagery of journeys abounds in Madonsela’s story. On her last day in office as Public Protector, her deputy, Kevin Malunga, said, ‘It has been an epic journey.’ Madonsela evoked the imagery of the children of Israel who forded the River Jordan to cross into the Promised Land. In the Bible’s book of Hebrews, it is clear that the Jordan is a timeless metaphor for crossing from death to renewal in eternity.

The idiom ‘crossing the Rubicon’ means reaching a point of no return. Arguably, Mandela helped the country to cross the river that brought it, miraculously and peacefully, through the transition to universal suffrage. We derive the expression from Julius Caesar’s audacious crossing of the Rubicon River, in northern Italy, in 49 bc. This crossing was considered an act of treason.

Historians tell us that, as Caesar crossed, he declared in Latin ‘alea iacta est’: the die is cast. In Madonsela’s final act in office, she cast the die. On the day of the report’s release, insurrection was in the air. The agony of many years’ want spilled onto the streets of Pretoria.

In his book Thabo Mbeki and the battle for the soul of the ANC, journalist William Gumede writes that ‘the sudden radicalisation of South Africa’s civil society after years of quiescence is largely due to growing impatience among the poor and the needy for official attention, empathy and delivery of jobs, services and welfare’.¹ He goes on to describe how ‘[f]or millions of black South Africans, the only difference between their miserable lives under apartheid and their miserable lives under the democracy they fought so long and hard to attain, is that they have the right to vote. Many of the new social movements had sprung up in the restless period immediately before the 2000 local elections’.²

Thousands filled the streets of the capital and tried to storm the Presidency’s grand premises, the Union Buildings. Prof. Tinyiko Maluleke, a Pretoria academic, writes that ‘South Africa’s underclass, growing as it does, in a context of gross inequality, is certainly becoming a huge mass of the most wretched of the earth’³ – like the millions of animals on the Serengeti. ‘For a while’, Maluleke continues, ‘they may be appeased with song, poetry, meagre remittances and political ­rhetoric. But they will not be calm for long. The triggers for each uprising vary but there is a discernable cyclical rhythm, a clear pattern in the forms of mayhem deployed and the disruptive if also irreverent messages performed.’

The old social justice movement that filled the ranks of the United Democratic Front (UDF) to make the country ungovernable in the stormy 1980s was back on the streets. Banners were thrust into the sky: Save South Africa! Zuma must go! Defend our vote! Away with looting! A people’s assembly was called in Pretoria. Johnny Clegg sang one of his famous songs, the one so beloved of the female detainees at Diepkloof Prison: ‘Asimbonang’ uMandela thina,’ the ageing freedom crooner belted out, just as he had in the 1980s.

At a mass meeting at Wits, Thuli Madonsela turned around and said, to me and other ageing former student activists, ‘Where are the exiles? It is all of us from the 1980s, here. It feels like old times again!’

Can the people of South Africa negotiate yet another perilous transition? After all, rivers are metaphysically associated with transcendence. In Greek mythology, the god Charon escorts the souls of the deceased across the rivers between the worlds of the living and the dead. In the mythology of ancient Egypt, Kush and the lands around the Nile River, the dead were taken across the Nile to the City of the Dead.

In African mythology – Nguni mythology, in particular – the ancestors inhabit the blessed land beyond the reeds and the waters. The lessons of rivers are profound: the river is at once the metaphor for death and for deliverance. ‘I really believe in metaphysics: that when we join our thoughts, whether to wish evil or to do good, the universe – in my sense it’s God – hears us better when we bring that energy together. I honestly think that people praying in different places brought that positive energy and whatever people were plotting, something just made them do the stupidest things,’ Thuli Madonsela said towards the end of her tenure.⁴

How many rivers do South Africans have to cross?

* * *

The Serengeti stretches from northern Tanzania to the south-western regions of Kenya. The Kenyan part of the Serengeti is called the Maasai Mara. When one beholds the Serengeti, one comes to know that the gods of these parts temper justice with mercy.

The winds of the Serengeti are gentle, and its sunsets breathtaking. But, like South Africa, these are the lands of pain and love. There are two seasons here – a season of plenty, and one of famine. When the rains fall and drench the earth, the vistas grow green, fluorescent, exquisite. But, when lean times fall upon the plains, the dust rises. The grass dries and crackles beneath hooves and feet. The sun grows harsh; the good winds stay beyond the horizon.

It is time for thousands to gather for the great migration. To voyage to the brink. But, first, there is a disquiet and rebellion in the air as stability-loving nature resists. Wildebeest storm through the gorges and across the Serengeti sand. In their midst, they create a smoke that calls, to perplex their predators. They strive to outfox those that would prey on them and their resources.

They rush towards the rain.

Through blazing-hot days, they roar and rumble and blast as they beat a path towards better times. This is no rambling promenade. It is a safari of life, death and hope.

In their tens of thousands, the wildebeest herds arrive at the Mara River – the river of death, and of life. They come to the brink and wait as they gather, preparing for the crossing. For days, they hesitate at the water’s edge. Some lock horns in the clouds of dust; others watch, studying how the sun glistens on the water. And then, en masse, young and old, they take the treacherous river by storm.

The people of South Africa must do the same, in this old and sophisticated country at a difficult time.

The story of Thuli Madonsela is the story of all of us who seek a just and more equitable society in better pastures.

William Gumede (2007), Thabo Mbeki and the battle for the soul of the ANC. Cape Town: Zebra Press, p. 365.

Ibid.

Tinyiko Maluleke (2016), ‘The insurrection of the poor’, Sunday Independent, 29 May 2016, http://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/the-insurrection-of-the-poor-2027572

Facebook post by Thuli Madonsela.

CHAPTER 1

WHISPERS IN THE DEEP

In a 2010 series of articles, the Mail & Guardian newspaper set out to select iconic songs that said something about being South African. Reporter Kwanele Sosibo¹ chose Stimela’s ‘Whispers in the Deep’, likely for its popularity on the streets of Soweto and for its aching refrain: ‘We are all tributaries of the great river of pain’.

Sosibo writes that the song had been one of the ‘elegies of [the country’s] apartheid nightmares’, and that it exemplified defiance. ‘But’, he goes on to say, ‘if the song has one overriding beauty, it is the ease with which it became both the medium and the message’. For a country pained by centuries of injustice, Thuli Madonsela became both the message of the need for justice for all and the medium for its realisation. ‘True to its name’, Sosibo writes, ‘[Whispers in the Deep] was exactly that – a long, poetic whisper, a wake-up call in the form of a gentle slap when the house was already on fire’. The same can be said of Madonsela’s tenure as Public Protector of South Africa and her attempts to awaken South Africa to the dangers of injustice and corruption.

Where does one begin to tell the story of Thulisile (‘one who has silenced us’) Nomkhosi (‘sister of the king’) Madonsela, the woman who came to be known simply as Thuli – the silent one – by South Africans of all walks of life? Her findings and recommendations about the ruling elite brought the country to a moment of reckoning, of how society’s powerless sought to use her office to hold the powerful to account.

Perhaps we need to start by looking to the past. Madonsela’s path to leadership and the spirit of her mission are born of pain. Chiselled and formed by the compounded misfortunes of being born poor, black and female in apartheid South Africa, Madonsela learnt quickly how to affirm herself and others, and to forge on, regardless.

In 1962, a time of intensified apartheid-government brutality and the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre and the March 1960 State of Emergency, Thuli Madonsela was born in South Western Townships, which later became known as Soweto – South Africa’s largest black township, one of the most socially and politically significant, and a place of injustice and pain.

The 1960s in Soweto were historic. In response to the relentless narrowing of the political space, Nelson Mandela and others decided to abandon peaceful protest and negotiation for armed struggle. They formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which was to become the armed wing of the newly banned African National Congress (ANC). The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had also been banned; it was a watershed moment in black civic and political life. The nation watched anxiously as apartheid security police rounded up the new MK high command at Liliesleaf, a farm in the suburb of Rivonia, outside Johannesburg. The Rivonia Trial began in 1963 – a year after Madonsela was born. Her parents read all they could about the unfolding events, discussing them in hushed tones over dinner in their Soweto home.

From the forced removal of black people in 1931 from white and mixed freehold areas to sub-townships like Orlando, the sprawling dormitory of the South Western Townships came into being. Founded as a cheap-labour reservoir for Johannesburg, the settlement soon acquired the nickname ‘Soweto’, but it was only in the year after Madonsela was born that this would become its official name. Soweto has its roots in loss, deprivation and outrage; the poetry and music of Madonsela’s generation of Sowetans express this.

Hers was a generation who lived under the repressive Natives (Urban Areas) Act 21 of 1923, which determined where black people could live and regulated their movements between prescribed (urban) and non-prescribed areas. The government had sought to remove black people from their homes, despite there being a backlog, in the late 1920s, of approximately forty thousand houses. Exorbitant taxes levied on black people in rural areas, and the fallout of the Great Depression, brought a new surge of people to Johannesburg. They came to seek their fortune after life on the land proved difficult – and also to seek relatives to unite their families.

To control this ‘influx’, in 1931 black people were removed from mixed and white suburbs and rural areas and settled in Orlando – the first of South Western Townships’ suburbs. By 1936, Orlando’s population was twelve thousand strong.

In 1948, the Afrikaner-dominated National Party (NP) and its apartheid policy came to power in South Africa. This spelled doom for the many black families who had settled in the freehold areas west of Johannesburg, in suburbs like Martindale, Newclare and the famous Sophiatown.

As the forced removals intensified, the bulldozers moved in. At gunpoint, families were broken up racially, classified, and relocated to new areas like Orlando, Diepkloof, Meadowlands, Dube and Rockville – or to ‘coloured or Indian’ areas. The separations plunged families into grief.

The removals resumed in 1955. By 1960, the programme to resettle Africans from the suburbs of Western Areas was complete, and the South Western Townships were fully formed. It became illegal for a black person to be in the city of Johannesburg or any of its white suburbs without a passbook.

Much of the history of Soweto is the history of resistance to the dreaded passbook, the identification document that regulated the movements of black people. It was in this climate that Madonsela was born in a typical apartheid-era house. Cynically called matchboxes, these houses were damp when it rained in summer, and cold in winter. They were very small and cramped; row upon row sprawled out over the plains. The countless streets between them ran like the delta of a river entering the sea.

Having no choice, the people of Soweto had to be creative and grow to love their environment – improvising and creating beauty nevertheless, making something out of nothing. To this day, Soweto housewives compete for the shiniest veranda or the most fetching flower garden. They seem to appreciate David Hume innately, that ‘[b]eauty is no quality in things themselves’. They understand that the human soul needs its own interpretation of beauty for nourishment and survival, against the odds.

Journalists who talk to Madonsela are often taken aback by her concern for dignity and beauty: personal and spiritual beauty, and the beauty of her surroundings, seem important to her. They also note how she finds, insistently, something positive in every situation. Andrew England of the Financial Times put it this way:²

Indeed, throughout our interview, Madonsela looks for the positive in whichever topic she is discussing – from Zuma to the state of corruption. It is an attitude that may be explained by a tough, working-class upbringing in the Johannesburg township of Soweto during apartheid. The four-room family house had two bedrooms, with one rented out while Madonsela and her siblings – she is the middle one of seven children – slept on the kitchen floor. There was no electricity or piped water. The toilet was outside.

‘I still think to some extent it’s why I don’t like small houses,’ she told England.

Chapter 2 of the South African Constitution contains a Bill of Rights, a list of interlocking civil, political and socio-economic rights. Dignity and privacy have pride of place among these rights. Social workers and psychologists have often pointed out that granting increasing privacy to a child enhances his or her cognitive and emotional development. Growing up in Soweto, Madonsela learnt that the degree of privacy and dignity a child enjoys is in direct proportion to the child’s family’s income.

Imagine night-time in the matchbox home. School uniforms are ironed, shoes are polished. Homework is done. Paraffin lamps are lit, and foam mattresses and bed linen are laid out next to the warmth of the Welcome Dover coal stove – at the heart of every matchbox home in Soweto, and the culprit for Soweto’s iconic smog. Imagine the smell of the wood and coal burning, of dinner having cooked in pots on the stove and the chatter of children sharing gossip, jokes and stories when the paraffin lamps are turned down, and then off.

Imagine – the children confiding in each other about their cares, concerns and pains, but also about their joys and dreams.

Whispering in the deep of the Soweto night.

* * *

In 1976, Soweto erupted.

The township’s anger had been simmering for a long time, its list of grievances already comprehensive long before the government’s declaration that Afrikaans was to be introduced as the medium of instruction in schools. On the list was the fact that, at the time, only 10 per cent of teachers in Soweto had a matric certificate. And that basic and high-school education for white children was free, yet black children had to pay R57 per year – almost half a month’s pay for the average Sowetan, due for each child.

Imagine the hassle in the Madonsela home, with seven children to put through school.

It is now common knowledge that, on Sunday 13 June 1976, four hundred young student leaders met in Orlando. The breathtakingly articulate 19-year-old Teboho ‘Tsietsi’ Mashinini addressed them. The students discussed the problems of Afrikaans, of funding their education, and of their parents in Soweto. They resolved that on the following Wednesday,