Agang SA’s challenge may have fizzled out, but Malema has promised to come out guns blazing when President Zuma comes to Parliament to answer MPs’ questions, writes Craig Dodds.
IT WAS supposed to be an opposition party demolition job on President Jacob Zuma. Instead, the hapless Agang took a flamethrower to the remains of its credibility. And, for the second week in a row, Zuma had the last laugh in Parliament.
Opposition co-operation, a notable feature of the post-election period last year, appears to have crumbled, for now, as individual parties scramble for attention in a dog-eat-dog quest for relevance.
So desperate was Agang MP Andries Tlouamma to register on the political Richter scale that he torpedoed his own motion of no-confidence in Zuma, withdrawing it on Tuesday before any other speaker on the slate could have their say.
He offered as justification for the move Speaker Baleka Mbete’s refusal to recuse herself from presiding over the debate – a matter that had already been pronounced on by a judge and for which there was no legal foundation.
It was a masterstroke of self-destruction, instantly uniting all parties, from the ANC to the EFF, in condemnation of its silliness.
This debate had been in the works since the National Assembly programming committee deadlocked in the previous Parliament over then Leader of the Opposition Lindiwe Mazibuko’s request for it to be scheduled.
It was the subject of a bitter court case at the time – at the end of which Judge Dennis Davis found there was a lacuna in the rules of Parliament that needed to be fixed to allow for such debates to be called.
Opposition parties have been biding their time since the elections, waiting for an opportune moment to strike – while the Nkandla, spy tapes and other sagas added to their stockpile of ammunition.
So Agang’s decision to table the motion on its own was an attempt to break the DA/EFF stranglehold on the national discourse about opposition politics – a bold move it backed up with a court application to prevent Mbete from presiding.
Each party is given a set time to speak based on the number of seats it has in Parliament. Usually that's three minutes or so for a small party like Agang but, because it had sponsored the motion, it was given two speaking turns. However, Tlouamma withdrew the motion instead of using his turns.
Unsurprisingly, the DA has snatched back the initiative, putting forward its own no confidence motion shortly after the aborted debate.
The ANC caucus, meanwhile, must have enjoyed a collective ROTFL session at the amateurish opposition assault.
And, instead of enduring headlines about nasty things opposition leaders had to say about him, Zuma got to carry on in the presidential vein in which he responded to the debate on his State of the Nation Address last week – telling the opening of the National House of Traditional Leaders on Thursday that in focusing on the Freedom Charter this year he was not being partisan because the document belonged to everybody.
He couldn’t have asked for a more benign week in Parliament, but that is certain to end when he returns on Wednesday to reply to questions for the first time since the infamous “pay back the money” incident in August last year.
EFF leader Julius Malema has already promised fireworks and, when it comes to how he intends to tackle Zuma, he has shown he can generally be taken at his word.
So far this year the ANC has framed the debate in Parliament as a question of its responsible approach of getting down to the business of running the country versus the opposition’s frivolous or even destructive focus on Zuma as an individual - a theme the president himself captured as the opposition “playing the man and not the ball”.
This has the useful effect of de-legitimising criticism of him as a distraction from more important matters of state and opposition parties have duly spent more time concentrating on issues.
Thus, the ANC responded to the DA’s relaunching of a no-confidence motion by saying Parliament’s time had already been wasted on Agang’s aborted effort and “this second motion from the DA would unfortunately further distract Parliament from the real business of addressing the serious challenges confronting many South Africans”.
This approach neatly casts the EFF as the real villains should it resort again to tactics the ANC describes as disruptive, such as chanting “pay back the money”, for example.
Unfortunately, the governing party spent Wednesday afternoon undermining its case, when Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and State Security Minister David Mahlobo ducked questions about the use of a jammer to scramble cellphone reception on the night of the State of the Nation Address, saying the issue was before the courts and therefore sub judice - even though this doesn’t prevent MPs from discussing it and Parliament has ruled as such in the past.
This potentially leaves the ANC back where it started in August last year, when the president’s cynical dodging of questions lent legitimacy to the EFF’s “pay back the money” onslaught.
If Zuma sailed through this week unscathed despite the Cape Town heatwave, he can expect a firestorm on Wednesday.
Independent Political Bureau