Johannesburg - Manchester United got thumped 7-0 by Liverpool on Sunday night. It was a rugby score in a soccer match. In the past four games, the goal differential increases to 17-2. It’s a little like Dali Mpofu’s legal career; far more losses than wins in the score sheet and he doesn’t even have a Carabao Cup to keep his fans happy.
He’d probably be happy with the two, but it doesn’t matter for his fans, who have supped long and hard at the Kool Aid. They celebrate the successful awarding of unopposed court applications with the fervour of a cup final win. In true Orwellian fashion, they regard his drubbing as proof positive of the sterling work the “People’s Advocate” has been doing to change the legal system from within.
As far as logic goes, it’s right up there with fighting for peace and fire pools, but that’s the cheap seats in the public gallery – or Twitter – for you.
Mpofu is a silk, or senior counsel, right at the top of a rarefied system that, until the advent of social media, was clouded in mystique, broken only by the reported oratory of practitioners like Tembeka Ngcukaitobi and Wim Trengove.
Mpofu might have the same letters behind his name as they do, but he is not in their league. His clients, almost to a wo/man, stretch the concept of innocent until (Stalingrad notwithstanding) proven guilty. His ratio decidendi tends to rest heavily on bullying and bluster; his grasp of the craft an obiter dictum for jurisprudential mediocrity.
For someone who stretches the latitude of the law and the tolerance of presiding officers to the extent he does, Mpofu is concomitantly thin-skinned and intolerant when anyone refuses to be cowed or have the temerity to challenge him in an open court – whether they are in the dock, opposing counsel or on the Bench.
This week he took on a person, who is, to all intents and purposes, an exceptionally polite, caring and ineffably kind, mother figure. She is also an advocate of the high court, a professor of law and, to our eternal debt, perhaps the bravest person in this country; a fine South African who stood up to Jacob Zuma in his prime as president to speak truth to power when she was public protector.
Mpofu was no match for her. Not this week, not any week. Silk or not, he’s not fit to carry Thuli Madonsela’s robing bag into court and act as her junior. Which perhaps explains why he tried to demean Madonsela during Parliament’s impeachment inquiry into her successor Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s fitness for office. When he couldn’t cow Madonsela, he resorted to the most appalling ad hominem attacks that had no basis in law, fact or relevance.
Mpofu appears untouchable, because he has successfully cowed the relevant professional bodies who should take issue with his conduct. But it doesn’t matter: South Africa’s unutterably worst public protector is fighting for her professional life with legal counsel that is the most perfect match imaginable.
That’s justice.