Cape Town - Small Business Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu has admitted she lost her cool during the chaotic sitting of Parliament this week. Zulu was filmed trading angry exchanges with members of the EFF and being coaxed back to her seat by Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini.
However, she says there’s nothing personal between her and EFF MP Godrich Gardee, with whom she appeared to engage in a lengthy spat across the aisle in the middle of proceedings, before he invited her to take matters outside and she rose to meet him in the corridor.
What got her blood boiling was the behaviour of the opposition in belittling her party.
“We’ve been insulted; we’ve been made to feel like there’s absolutely nothing we have done for this country; we’ve been made to feel like we’re just a bunch of useless, corrupt people and we know that that’s not who we are,” Zulu said on Saturday.
“We know, and we’ve accepted, that we make our mistakes, but we’re always accommodating, always tolerant; because we believe this democracy is something that needs us to do that.”
She said, however, that it had been difficult to tolerate the heckling and insults of that afternoon.
“We can tolerate the heckling in the House, but this disrespect, the undermining, the patronising, those things clubbed together – may I just say I am also a human being,” Zulu said.
Anyone who didn’t sometimes get emotional must be dead, she added.
When Gardee suggested that they meet outside, she had gone with the idea they might be able to settle the matter amicably.
“My thinking was when we are outside maybe we can even talk like human beings and, you know, (say) ‘let’s not do this thing, this is really ugly, we can’t continue like this’.”
Instead, when she got there she discovered Gardee had remained inside and four other EFF members were waiting for her.
“I never touched anybody, I never pushed anybody, it was the EFF that started making the noise and then the police came in to push them back – that’s all that happened,” Zulu said.
Dlamini had accompanied her and, with other ANC MPs, persuaded her to return to the Chamber.
She said it was not what the EFF MPs had said to her that set her off, but their behaviour in the course of the whole afternoon.
“It was the manner in which they were treating the entire house; the manner in which they were treating Baleka Mbete particularly as the Speaker, the manner in which they were using foul language.”
She also declined to comment on EFF leader Julius Malema’s description of her on Friday as a street girl.
South Africans knew what she stood for and “know very well that I don’t just hit it off, out of the blue for nothing”.
“So I will not comment because of my dignity – everything I stand for. He doesn’t deserve my comment,” Zulu said.
She said she respected the EFF for the fact that South Africans had chosen the party to represent them in Parliament.
“But I don’t think people elected them to come and be so disruptive, so disrespectful; it’s like the Wild West. We didn’t fight for the Wild West.
“We fought for us to be able to use the rules so that the one who wins the day is the one who has respect for the rules, respect for the debate; the one who has a better voice, not just voice as in saying (something), but the one who has a way of putting across his beliefs and aspirations. That’s what we believe in; not this thing they are doing.
“And they are really pushing us into the corner.”
She said she would continue to try to uphold the decorum of Parliament, but “I will admit that we are also human, so the blood will boil sometimes”.
Political Bureau