Parly must be more strict - Zuma

President Jacob Zuma addressing The New Age Business Briefing which aimed to discuss the highlights of the State of the Nation Address and how it impacts the people of South Africa, Cape Sun Hotel, Cape Town, 13/02/2015. Siyasanga Mbambani/DoC.

President Jacob Zuma addressing The New Age Business Briefing which aimed to discuss the highlights of the State of the Nation Address and how it impacts the people of South Africa, Cape Sun Hotel, Cape Town, 13/02/2015. Siyasanga Mbambani/DoC.

Published Feb 13, 2015

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Cape Town - President Jacob Zuma has appeared to suggest that even stronger tactics should be used in future in Parliament.

Zuma’ s State of the Nation Address (SONA) turned into chaos on Thursday night with the Democratic Alliance and the United Democratic Movement staging a walkout, while the EFF were shown the door.

EFF leader Julius Malema and other party members were forced out for insisting on asking Zuma when he would pay back the money they believe he owes the taxpayers for security upgrades to his Nkandla home.

DA MPs then left in droves after Speaker of Parliament Baleka Mbete and National Council of Provinces chair Thandi Modise refused to answer questions around security.

“They are actually causing chaos. So you have a problem,” Zuma told guests during The New Age Business Briefing at the Cape Sun Hotel in Cape Town on Friday.

“Clearly to my view this is a time for Parliament to stand up and apply the rules more strictly than they do,” he said.

Zuma reportedly said that the EFF was determined to disrupt proceedings no matter what.

“We tried to answer the question to help the members understand… but they didn’t because stuck in their minds was disrupting Parliament, that’s all,” EWN quoted the president as saying on Friday.

He said Parliament’s presiding officers had acted accordingly.

“My thought, particularly of the presiding officers, were excellent. They kept explaining the same thing after and explained and explained and explained. Even a person who is not a Parliamentarian would have understood the rules of Parliament.”

Zuma also tackled the issue of load shedding, saying that South Africa's energy woes are a “challenge” but not a crisis and government knows how to address it.

“I think we have a challenge, not a crisis,” Zuma said on Friday after he had announced a R23 billion cash injection for Eskom during SONA on Thursday night.

The president again blamed the scheduled blackouts, in part, on the apartheid regime's failure to expand the electricity supplier's capacity.

“If you look at energy, energy has a history in this country, it has never been enough. It was believed to be because the powers that be at the time said 'we have enough'.”

“So the demand has just rocketed after 1994, and therefore undermined the capacity we have.”

Zuma added that he was concerned about shortcomings in the running of the power grid and government wanted to establish whether this was due to negligence.

“You can't have one power station collapsing after the other because they are not serviced; where were the people who are working there? What were they doing?”

But he said government believed it could resolve the capacity constraints that had seen Eskom increase load-shedding in recent weeks.

“We have a plan for dealing with the matter. It is a good plan, great plan, and we are financing it. So it is not like we don't know what to do.”

Sapa, AFP and Political Bureau

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