The Democratic Alliance on Wednesday asked the South African Police Service to investigate communications minister Dina Pule, her alleged boyfriend Phosane Mngqibisa, SABC chief financial officer Gugu Duda and SABC CEO Lulama Makhobo over allegations of corruption.
“The charges relate to the alleged corruption in appointments made at the department of communications and its entities,” says DA MP Marian Shinn in a statement. In turn, Pule has described Shinn’s actions as “curious”.
The DA had said on Tuesday that Shinn would press criminal charges against Pule, but it appears that instead she chose simply to lodge an affidavit with the police and to ask them to investigate the matter. She told TechCentral that the police had agreed to discuss the matter, and could refer to it to their legal advisers and to the Western Cape provincial police commissioner.
Shinn’s decision to involve the police is based largely on a 24 March report in the Sunday Times, in which the newspaper said it had, among other things, “uncovered evidence of an internal audit showing Mngqibisa engineered getting friends and relatives on the boards of the Post Office, Sentech, the Universal Service & Access Agency of South Africa and the SABC with the full knowledge of Pule”.
“Section 34 (1) of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act stipulates that any person who holds a position of authority and who knows or ought reasonably to have known or suspected that any other person has committed an offence has a duty to report it,” Shinn says in the statement.
“Corruption cannot be tolerated at any level and any warranted suspicion of corruption of public representatives should be fully investigated by the South African Police Service.”
In reaction to Shinn’s request to the police, Pule says she respects the right of citizens to approach law enforcement agencies when they suspect wrongdoing of any sort, but adds that it is “instructive that Shinn and the DA are the ones who approached the public protector and parliament’s joint committee on ethics and members’ interests. Shinn is well aware that these two legitimate institutions have not completed their work.
“Perhaps Shinn … can enlighten South Africans about what she knows about parliament and the public protector that makes her impatient about their work. She clearly doesn’t want to wait for the outcomes of due processes undertaken by the two institutions. Her actions seem to suggest either that she is more than happy to use government resources to score cheap political points or prove that, indeed, the devil has ship-loads of work for idle minds.” — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media