Parliament - ANC Chief Whip in Parliament Pemmy Majodina says that they are not concerned by threats that have been made by the Economic Freedom Fighters to disrupt President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address on Thursday night.
The party’s leader Julius Malema last month told a group of his party’s supporters that they would disrupt SONA if Ramaphosa did not fire Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan.
Ramaphosa on Wednesday said that he was not losing any sleep over the EFF’s plans to disrupt his much-anticipated delivery of the State of the Nation Address.
Speaking to Independent Media in Cape Town on Thursday, Majodina said that anarchy will not be tolerated and that Parliament’s presiding officers will deal with anarchy accordingly if it erupted.
“When you are a leader, you can’t call for disruption of parliament. SONA has a particular purpose, there are various platforms to engage and if they want to engage the President about their displeasure about comrade Pravin they can do that at any time but not in parliament by way of disrupting parliament. That is a no, no, no,” Majodina said.
She said that all 13 parties out of the 14 in the National Assembly were opposed to the EFF’s plans to disrupt Ramaphosa and urged the presiding officers to invoke the rules and deal with accordingly with anarchy.
“There’s no other term to describe that, that is anarchy, period. Today there is no debate, today it’s one person, the president, delivering the state of the nation address. Next week on the 18 and 19th all parties will debate the state of the nation address.
“So if I was them (EFF) I was going to come and raise the issues when the debate is taking place next week, but disruption is not taking us anywhere and it also undermines the posture of the legislature because people are looking forward to seeing parliamentarians that are behaving. Really, anarchy is not part of us.”