Cape Town - The State of the Province Address could not go ahead in the Western Cape legislature on Friday after the Speaker suspended proceedings because of unruliness.
Speaker Sharna Fernandez said she could not carry on because African National Congress members were disruptive, and she suspended the session around 11.30am.
Premier Helen Zille started delivering her speech in a media briefing a short while later.
An hour earlier, Zille stood up to start her speech, but ANC chief whip Pierre Uys rose on a point of order.
What followed was lively back-and-forth comment between the ANC and Democratic Alliance benches, with Fernandez at the centre of the confrontation.
Uys criticised the legislature for apparently changing its mind on how to deal with an alleged racist comment made by Zille in December.
Initially, the matter was to be referred to a judge president for review but it was then decided to refer it to the legislature's rules committee.
“A rules committee makes rules, not a ruling. We were horrified to hear and you didn't inform us,” Uys said to jeers from DA members.
He said the decision to block implementation of a ruling referring the matter to court was illegal and in bad faith.
Fernandez responded that she had severe reservations about referring an internal dispute to a court before all internal remedies had been considered.
“As Speaker, it is incumbent on me to ensure procedures are fair. Any person or party is free to make an application to court.”
The house was suspended and then resumed after half-an-hour.
Fernandez said she was not going to entertain any more comments and the matter could be debated at a later stage.
Provincial ANC chairman Marius Fransman jumped up to say he had just received a complaint that the live television feed had been cut.
The speaker had it checked out and said that was definitely not the case.
“So it's been reactivated?” Fransman asked.
Fernandez said nothing had been reactivated and that the feed had been live at all times.
Fransman followed up with an allegation that there were private security guards waiting to enter the house from a nearby room.
This allegation was quickly shot down.
Fernandez referred to President Jacob Zuma's comments on Thursday during his reply to debate in Parliament on his State of the Nation Address a week earlier.
“We need to preserve the dignity of Parliament. That is what our president said.”
ANC MPLs refused to calm down, leading to the suspension.
Zille’s speech was due to report that the DA-led government had consulted widely on its new policy priorities, called “game changers”.
The eight aims are to:
* Achieve energy security; promote rapid growth in three key economic sectors with the highest potential for new jobs.
* Ensure delivery of high-speed broadband internet access across the province.
* Test effective e-learning models in our schools.
* Create after-school opportunities for young people to participate in sport, cultural and academic activities.
* Tackle alcohol abuse.
* Provide water and decent sanitation that exceeds the basic national minimum standard.
* Pioneer an integrated living model torestructure the apartheid legacy of our cities and towns.
The DA-led government will release its plans together with measurable outcomes and defined timelines.
The “game-changers” form part of the province’s provincial strategic plan for 2014-2019, which sets out the vision and strategic priorities for the DA-led government’s second term in office.
The three key economic sectors targeted by the provicnial government include tourism, agri-processing and servicing the growing oil and gas sector.
The overall plan sets out five strategic goals, each backed by a plan to maintain continuous improvement in the lives of citizens.
These are to:
* Create opportunities for growth and jobs.
* Improve education outcomes and opportunities for youth development.
* Increase wellness, safety and tackle social ills.
* Enable a resilient, sustainable, quality and inclusive living environment.
* Embed good governance and integrate service delivery through partnerships and spatial alignment.
Zille was set to tell the opposition that she was not going to spend time telling the “good news” stories from the DA-led government’s previous term as its track-record spoke for itself.
She also planned to hit back at parties who have criticised her government for a spate of racist attacks in the province
The provincial government has worked day and night to build an inclusive society that eradicates the legacy of apartheid, according to her speech.
Zille was also set to outline how her administration planned to create conditions for economic growth, provide better education, and deliver better health, safety and social services to citizens.
Economic growth and jobs remain her government’s top priority as the only way to fight poverty in a sustainable way.
The province’s economy grew by 2.3 percent last year, outpacing national economic growth, during a year of bleak economic prospects, according to her speech.
“The Western Cape has the lowest broad unemployment rate in the country – 24.5 percent – which is a full 10.1 percent below the national broad unemployment rate. It also has the lowest number of discouraged work seekers, at 22 000 people, compared to Kwa-Zulu Natal’s 616 000 discouraged work seekers, Limpopo’s 403 000 or Gauteng’s 379 000.”
The number of discouraged work seekers in the province had gone down by 33 percent since 2009, despite the fact that the total population in the Western Cape has grown from 5.35 million to 6.1 million over the past five years.
But she stressed that youth unemployment remained a particular challenge. “But even these have now been trumped by our current energy crisis. Simply put, if there is no energy, there is no economy. The disastrous management of electricity generation, transmission and reticulation by Eskom, a state owned enterprise, has left us with a chronically unpredictable electricity supply, which drives away investment and destroys jobs.”
Going on the attack, the premier said in her speech that Zuma is obviously not serious about solving the crisis because he insists on maintaining Eskom’s monopoly and pursuing the unaffordable Russian nuclear deal that, even if it gets off the ground, cannot deliver any power for the next 15 years.
Sapa and Cape Argus