Has Parliament finally lost the plot?

Cape Town.13.11.14. EFF Whip Godrich Gardee reacts in the National Assembly during the debate about the Nkandla report which clears President Zuma from any wrongdoing, Picture Ian Landsberg

Cape Town.13.11.14. EFF Whip Godrich Gardee reacts in the National Assembly during the debate about the Nkandla report which clears President Zuma from any wrongdoing, Picture Ian Landsberg

Published Nov 15, 2014

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Every time things don’t go according to ideological expectation, the mask of reason slips and we’re back to name calling and chest thumping, writes Craig Dodds

Cape Town - It was a bit like watching an old movie for the umpteenth time, one you didn’t even enjoy the first time around.

The cast was familiar, their lines popped into your head before they were uttered and the ending was more than just predictable – you knew it before you started watching.

Thus Parliament’s staging of the great Nkandla debate headed for an inevitable denouement this week.

It will have come as no shock to anyone that the ANC-only ad hoc committee on Nkandla cleared President Jacob Zuma of any responsibility, nor that the combined opposition parties, who had earlier walked out of the committee, laid the blame squarely at his door.

After many hours of discussion, going over ground already exhaustively covered in no less than five reports, with stupefying blasts of hot air and at some expense, the committee arrived at exactly the point we knew it would, issuing a sixth report, which recommends, more or less, that the steps recommended in the other reports, except those of the public protector relating to the president, be carried out.

Many wondered whether there was any point.

But that is to imagine that somehow the rules of democracy might bend and the majority party surrender to the minority.

The constitutional ideal may be that Parliament holds the executive to account, but if that ideal ever applied it has long slipped beneath the waters of realpolitik.

The possibility that the governing party might have sifted through the evidence and come to the conclusion that its president should be hung out to dry was never on the table. Political parties tend not to do that kind of thing, unless the estimated electoral cost is greater than the probable internal fallout.

In practical terms this means, at the least, that someone in the party must be ready to step into the shoes of its leader with a sufficient critical mass of support to minimise the bloodletting.

The ANC made that calculation at its Mangaung conference way back in 2012, when it re-elected Zuma as its leader, and the May election results show it was correct in assuming its losses could be contained.

It will no doubt recalibrate constantly in the run-up to the 2016 local government election.

Nor were the opposition MPs ever going to be convinced they had got it wrong.

Having known from the start what they would conclude, both the ANC and the opposition parties had a single objective in the ad hoc committee process – to construct a plausible enough narrative to sustain the outcome each had determined in advance and to maximise public agreement with their position.

Each side was able to draw from the documents before them.

For the ANC the story went along the following lines: Zuma never asked for any of the security upgrades at Nkandla, though he was informed of the need for them.

A group of officials proceeded to pretty much tear up the rule book on how such projects are supposed to be managed – in terms of financial controls, supply chain management, implementation and oversight.

In effect they surrendered all control of the project to Zuma’s personal architect, Minenhle Makhanya, who was handed the power to determine what was required to be built, the scale at which it was to be built, who should build it and at what cost.

This amounted to a gross dereliction of duty on the part of the officials, though there is no explanation offered as to why they would have taken such risks, under the nose of the president no less, without receiving any benefit (the Special Investigating Unit did a forensic analysis of their bank accounts and found none).

Though Zuma introduced Makhanya to the Public Works team, he never suggested he should be handed such power.

There was no evidence suggesting Zuma unduly influenced anyone in the process.

He also could not be said to have benefited unduly from the addition of features, such as the swimming pool, visitors’ centre, extensive landscaping, amphitheatre, etc, that were never on the list of security requirements compiled by the police, because the police didn’t follow all the steps required for such an assessment and the subsequent design of the features.

The committee suggested the cabinet get a proper team of security experts to decide what legitimately constitutes security features.

For the opposition it was never plausible that Zuma could have witnessed all these goings on in his back yard without ever wondering how, for example, a swimming pool could possibly form part of his security requirements.

They argued Zuma must have known about and probably initiated the extravagance.

The behaviour of the Public Works officials could be explained only by the conclusion that they were taking orders from above.

In fact, according to the opposition, the plan was always to merge the work on Zuma’s private houses with the security upgrades so the costs could be conflated and Zuma let off the hook for both.

Which story anyone chooses to buy is up to them, but this is what Parliament is for – to offer an assortment of arguments that helps the public to make sense of the contested world they inhabit.

There is a natural craving for narrative that translates the convulsions of the body politic into the logic of debate in which it is possible to choose sides.

More important than partisan affiliation is that there should be such a process, taking the confusion of events around us and turning them into reason, a story with a beginning, middle and end, even if it is ultimately only faith in a preferred ideology that delivers the outcome.

Then someone flipped the channel and, instead of Gone With the Wind, we were watching WWE Raw.

Our “honourable” public representatives got down in the mud, flung off the cloak of civility – frayed already – and got into a protracted verbal (and in the hallways, physical) brawl that culminated in the police dragging an EFF MP from the chamber.

The mask of reason slipped and we were back in the infantile world of name calling and chest thumping.

There are many candidates for blame in this regression, depending on which side you’re on.

The president, for refusing to step forward and bring the matter to a close when he could have done so long ago, choosing instead to shun public engagement except in controlled circumstances.

The ANC, for attempting to perform a national frontal lobotomy by expecting the public to accept an implausible story.

The opposition, for taking to guerrilla tactics in a democratically elected Parliament.

Parliament’s presiding officers, for, in the kindest interpretation, slipping up in the uniform application of the rules and so feeding into perceptions of unfairness.

There will be winners and losers in the public perception stakes.

But Parliament has forfeited its status as the house of reason. It is now the site of rupture.

Instead of the soothing, if frequently banal, narrative of political contest, we have the pure frenzy of political spectacle, form over content.

Parliament, instead of assimilating the contradictions of society into logic and law, simply reflects those contradictions back in a distorting fairground mirror that, if anything, magnifies them.

Ultimately, when democracy is no longer able to mediate tensions in society the options are reduced to harder forms of power.

It may have largely symbolic force for now, but the intrusion of police into the inner sanctum of democracy carries ominous warnings of where things might end up if something doesn’t change.

It is up to everyone involved to consider their part in the long unseemly slide – whose beginnings can be traced back to long before this, the fifth Parliament – and try something different.

Unfortunately there is one more, potentially even more explosive hurdle, to clear before the end of year recess in which everyone will have time to simmer down and reflect.

On Tuesday, barring a change in the programme, Parliament will debate the outcome of the EFF disciplinary process, in which its MPs were found guilty and sentenced to sanctions of up to 30 days’ suspension without pay for their role in the “pay back the money” saga that wound up being Zuma’s last, aborted, appearance in the National Assembly this term.

There is every likelihood the ugly scenes of this week will be repeated or even surpassed in scale and violence. And it is unlikely the intervening “season of goodwill” will yield anything of the sort.

The first set piece of the new year, after the recess, will be Zuma’s State of the Nation address at the opening of Parliament and the debate that follows.

That means the new year is likely to kick off exactly where this one ended, in scenes of pandemonium and, for the public, despair.

Unless someone hits the pause button.

Independent Media Political Bureau

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