A dangerous game as the ANC puts itself above parliamentary sovereignty, separation of powers and rule of law, writes Susan Booysen.
Johannesburg - On Thursday night, South Africa saw its government’s future. It was no pretty sight. The haunting image that emerged from the parliamentary pandemonium, remaining when the thunder had subsided, was of an ANC in government hell-bent on protecting a president above everything. It was the portrait of a party bowing before its president first.
The nation and the constitution came later, if at all.
It was an ANC so entrapped in its scandals that it probably brought another one on itself – the “jamming in the night of the white shirts” scandal – all in aid of protecting its president from the Nkandla scandal. An injury to the leader is an injury to all. The party fell deeper into a quagmire of ignominy.
Its compulsion to escape the leadership improbity consumed it far more than lifting South Africa from depths of all its policy and governance problems.
The ANC is playing a dangerous game. Putting itself above the rule of law, the separation of powers, parliamentary sovereignty, and respect for the presumably sacrosanct institutions created by the constitution, is a perilous move.
The ruling party seems not to care if this takes subjugation of the legislative to the executive. If this requires that the freedom of expression be blocked for the sake of power, the ANC appears to say “bring it on”.
On the inglorious historical day, while damage was being inflicted on South Africa’s democracy, each of the protagonists was winner and loser.
Some were obviously bloodied, manhandled, expelled or forced into retreat.
The most ignominious of them all, however, were the ANC and its president.
Yet they imagined themselves emerging in splendour.
The war involves a line-up of top names and institutions, all integral to democracy. The jamming and white shirts scandal will draw in even more.
The biggest loser of the night was President Jacob Zuma.
For those who had not yet seen or experienced his ruthless, calculating and parochial political side, these faculties were displayed graphically.
This was the president who chuckled and giggled away the invasion of Parliament by armed security force “troops” who were in effect under his command as chief of the executive.
This was also the president who declared on the eve of the State of the Nation address (Sona) that he was not nervous about the impending event, including the EFF’s promise that it would insist on accountability.
He added that he had never been nervous in his life.
Of course, he would not be nervous about an event (to unfold along predictable EFF Nkandla questions) that was by all indications being stage-managed by loyal security intelligence forces.
These forces are at his service, and presumably under direct control of the Minister of State Security, David Mahlobo, a presidential appointee who had risen from relative obscurity into top-level Zuma service.
In the jamming phase of the Thursday night scandal, Mahlobo was seen receiving and tossing aside a note (possibly from Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa), initially refusing to read it.
Eventually he did and left the chamber. When he returned the signal was back.
“I am not aware of the involvement of the minister of state security,” was the non-denial by Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe.
Mahlobo and Zuma may imagine themselves covered in glory, but an avalanche of protest is accumulating.
Signals may be blocked only in the national security interest by state security agencies.
Was this a case of the national security agencies blocking the signal in defence of Zuma’s interests, equating the president’s interests with the nation’s?
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa pointed to probable illegality, saying: “The national security cluster departments may, where supported by relevant security legislation, deploy the use of jammers in relation to, among other things, state security functions.”
The jamming scandal has possibly placed the ANC in a worse than deserved position. After all, spokesman Zizi Kodwa stated that the “ANC condemns the jamming of the signal… in Parliament” and the ANC “supports the free flow of information and media freedom”.
Who was responsible for sending in the “troops”? Who were the men (mostly) and women in their “incognito” dress, camouflaged as some type of ushers?
If they were from public order policing they are SAPS and not parliamentary support staff.
Here, too, the national executive ostensibly invaded Parliament, breaching constitutional principles of parliamentary sovereignty and separation of powers. In this case, then, the great losers are those who prioritised the great occasion of the Sona over values of accountability.
The presiding officers had their roles scripted for them. They were puppets, under direct command of their political superiors and the strategic intermediaries.
They were handed notes on how to proceed. They read some prepared rulings. They had no choice but to call in the security force contingent.
They were unable, or refused, to answer DA questions about scrambling the cellphone signal around Parliament, and who exactly made up the security contingent.
On the first score, the Speaker, Baleka Mbete simply announced: “The issue of the scrambling has been unscrambled.”
Mbete and the National Council of Provinces chairwoman, Thandi Modise, are probably seeing themselves as winners, given that the president congratulated them on the way in which they handled the parliamentary session from hell.
Did these two women – one an eternally ambitious presidential hopeful, the other owing her political role to the goodwill of the Zuma faction of the ANC – consider that there might be a greater good in South Africa than the ANC in its current incarnation?
The narrative constructed by the ANC is that the opposition parties, and especially the EFF, are the villains who threaten democracy.
The ANC has been hard at work to construct the storyline of the EFF as a threat to democracy, and EFF leaders as demagogues, fascists and hooligans.
Influential ANC figures have systematically recast the EFF as the über villain, the dangerous and demagogic party that has to be crushed. They conveniently forget that the “ruffians” speak truths that millions of South Africans recognise.
Consider the Minister of Defence, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, urging South Africans in a voice that drips with allusions to conspiracy to stand up to “defend our democracy” (against the EFF).
This is the politician who helped deliver her president from Guptagate.
She is the security cluster survivor of the 2014 Zuma cabinet reshuffles.
Add the voice of ANC deputy chief whip, Doris Dlakude, mobilising for resistance against the ANC being held to ransom by the “hooligans”.
Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education and in the pound seats of presidential influence, has long portrayed the EFF as fascist.
Part of the counter-EFF narrative is that of Parliament as a circus: “If we allow Parliament to become a circus, we are destroying democracy,” ANC secretary- general Gwede Mantashe said after the fiasco.
The story line has been so successful, so frequently repeated that the EFF is commonly crucified for being disrespectful of democratic institutions.
Some of the mass media help to spread the message handsomely.
A variation on the theme happened to Public Protector Thuli Madonsela.
She was crucified for advocating accountability and calling the president to task (even if the president insists she did not find against him).
Procedure is elevated seamlessly over substance. “We are asking the president when he is going to pay back the money” reverberates, but by now the ANC and many under its influence look past the president as the archetype of broader public sector abuse of funds.
Hence the ANC MPs’ victory embraces and their triumphal songs on the steps of Parliament followed.
“We did it, we had to show them who is in charge,” they shouted.
Little did they know that they may also have been celebrating the subjugation of their own voices.
It was a sad day for multiparty democracy in South Africa when the ANC was backed by the ultra-conservatives among the opposition parties, specifically the Inkatha Freedom Party and some in the African Christian Democratic Party.
The liberator was no longer the unambiguous defender of democratic values.
It chose the arrogance of power over respect for the institutions of democracy. The discourse of constitutionalism came to rest in the hands of opposition parties.
Above all, this week’s events confirmed how the ANC reacts under pressure.
It nurtures enemy narratives and wipes out opponents with the use of state force.
It will be underhanded and ensure that it issues statements that deny the actions.
Oversight and accountability suffer for these priorities.
The effects work their way through the system. As seen from research, a sceptical corps of citizens has taken note.
Given all of the rules that were broken this opening session of Parliament was a scandal in its own right.
It vies with Nkandla, Guptagate and the spy tapes. And more and more state institutions become entangled in the web of the ANC maintaining power.
Each time another layer of scandal is added the ANC will find it more difficult to disentangle the mess.
The more it is in trouble, the stronger the denials, the counter-narratives and identification of enemies. The more this accumulation takes shape, the deeper the reliance on state organisations.
And so the story continues.
* Booysen is professor in the Wits School of Governance and author of The ANC and the Regeneration of Political Power.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media
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