Quinton Mtyala
The ANC on Tuesday dramatically failed in its bid to impeach Premier Helen Zille after claims that she had lied to the legislature.
Instead of voting to impeach her, the majority of the DA-dominated house chose to endorse her.
Earlier, during the debate, Human Settlements MEC Bonginkosi Madikizela slammed the ANC’s impeachment bid as a desperate act.
He said there was no proof that Zille had spied on her colleagues.
“It is the ANC that is guilty... it is led by a president who has used state resources to dodge the court,” said Madikizela.
The ANC has accused Premier Helen Zille of lying to the legislature, when she claimed in the chamber last week – that apart from one interaction – she had never met moonlighting police crime intelligence officer Paul Scheepers.
On Tuesday the ANC served a motion in the provincial legislature to have Zille impeached as Western Cape premier over claims that she had used Scheepers’s expertise in bugging cellphones to spy on her cabinet colleagues Lennit Max and Theuns Botha.
Zille said she used Scheepers to debug cellphones as she did not trust the State Security Agency.
The State Security Agency has said Zille acted illegally by employing a private company to do security sweeps.
Scheepers is accused of fraud, perjury and contravening the Electronic Communications Act. The National Prosecutions Authority last month indicated that the intelligence cop would have additional charges added when he returned to court in March next year.
Separate from the initial criminal investigation, the police’s Hawks unit also indicated they would investigate how Scheepers came to possess a “grabber” machine which has the ability to intercept all cellphone communications within a seven kilometre radius.
Ahead of the motion of impeachment, ANC provincial chairman Marius Fransman said the party wanted to know who had “deployed” Scheepers’s company Eagle Eye Solutions Technology to the DA-controlled Stellenbosch municipality.
“At which other municipalities did this company work? What were they doing, what was the mandate?” asked Fransman.
He said the DA’s march earlier in the day to the ANC’s provincial offices, to protest the party’s alleged links with gang bosses, was political grandstanding.
The ANC also wants to know how Scheepers could have been given a tender with the provincial government without any proper due diligence being done, which would have shown that he was an active-duty police officer.
“This is very serious and we believe that the premier must come clean.
“This is the foundation of the constitution and the oath that Helen Zille has put forward and we ask that the State Security Minister (David Mahlobo) and the SAPS national department speedily deal with this matter because we can’t continue with a premier that we believe has actually (acted illegally),” said Fransman.
While Scheepers’s contract with the provincial government was for “debugging” cellpones, Fransman said the tender specifications would show that his work was extended beyond this remit.
“Those are our concerns, and those are the issues that Zille must deal with,” said Fransman.
He claimed that there was serious intimidation within the ranks of the DA caucus, with Lennit Max having been absent for the last two days due to being booked off sick.
“We’ve heard that they’ve all been called, one by one, these MPLs, into a particular line,” said Fransman.
With 26 seats, the DA has a significant majority in the provincial legislature over the ANC’s 14 seats.