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Hlaudi Motsoeneng. Photo: Elizabeth Sejake
The Public Protector violated the labour rights of Hlaudi Motsoeneng, the chief operations officer of the SABC, in her damning report released in 2014.
And Thuli Madonsela should not have investigated the allegation that Motsoeneng lied on his SABC job application about passing matric, because she wasn’t entitled to do so.
These are some of the main reasons that the SABC decided to ask the North Gauteng High Court to review and set aside Madonsela’s report When Governance and Ethics Fail.
The SABC provided these reasons in a stay application, which was handed in at the Western Cape High Court yesterday.
The SABC has asked the Western Cape High Court to stop an earlier lawsuit from the Democratic Alliance pending the outcome of his application for review (which would be heard by the North Gauteng High Court) of the Public Protector’s findings.
Madonsela has objected to the SABC’s action, with one of the arguments made by her legal team being that the period for the SABC to have her report reviewed had already expired.
The Public Protector and the Democratic Alliance opposed the application yesterday, with the DA’s legal team describing the stay application as “one of the worst abuses of court processes”.
The SABC, its board of directors and the chairperson of the board said in court papers that, in their application in the North Gauteng High Court, they had argued that Motsoeneng and the SABC had labour rights.
“Motsoeneng had the right to defend himself against any accusations of misconduct in disciplinary processes.”
According to the court documents, Madonsela had thus restricted the rights of the SABC and Motsoeneng with her findings.
The SABC argued that the approach adopted by the Public Protector was bad in law because it hamstrung the ability of the SABC to conduct a full disciplinary enquiry into the Motsoeneng’s conduct.
On the complaint about Motsoeneng’s qualifications the SABC argued that the Public Protector misdirected herself in regard to one of the complaints, by considering it despite the fact that the facts underpinning it arose more than two years before the complaint was made
“She approached the enquiry in the wrong way – she started by assuming that she was empowered to consider the complaint even though it was more than two years’ old.
“It was therefore incorrect for the Public Protector to find that the complaint about Motsoeneng’s qualifications when he joined the SABC “was a continuous problem”, it said.
Judgment was reserved.
