People who care about Parliament are ashamed of the way in which it ducked its constitutional duty, exactly as Chief Justice Zondo predicted recently on the subject of future state capture. It failed to hold the president to account regarding the Phala Phala scandal.
Speaker Mapisa-Nqakula, a nice motherly woman whom I like as a person, is completely out of her depth in that role. She seems unable to control the House or the hooligans in the EFF, those deliberate underminers of democratic debate who each earn over a million Rand a year as MPs, paid by the taxpayers.
Worse still, the speaker permitted the president to get away with what can only be described as contempt for Parliament and the Constitution. He had the gall to state that he had been given advice not to make a statement about the scandal in which it is alleged that many millions of US dollars, stashed in his furniture, remained undeclared in terms of the law and that the money was stolen from him without a proper statement ever being made to the SAPS.
There are further allegations about money laundering and about what can only be described as highly unorthodox dealings with a neighbouring country and what sounds like illegal actions by the presidential security detachment.
As a person who practised as an attorney for over forty years, I learned that clients do not necessarily accept every bit of advice given to them as though it formed part of the Gospel in the New Testament. Certainly, a client as sophisticated, intelligent and educated as President Ramaphosa would be expected to apply his own brain to such advice.
That is, if he is innocent. If he is not, the explanation for his refusal to explain himself becomes crystal clear. His statement that he will let the law take its course is not satisfactory to millions of South Africans who want to believe in the honesty and integrity of our Head of State.
The matter is compounded by the constitutional duty of the president to answer questions in Parliament, especially during the time allocated for President’s Questions. He failed properly to do so because he was protected by the Speaker who declared that the time for questions had passed, making it impossible for the parties to pose questions arising from his answer. The Speaker quoted as a precedent (such exquisite judgment on her part) that the last time question time was cut short was in 2014 when President Zuma was being questioned (and desperately protected by ANC MPs) about the Nkandla scandal.
What has gone wrong with the Corruption Buster that President Ramaphosa promised to be when he assumed office? If ever there was disillusionment with a politician, he personifies it.
I hear increasingly the cry from ordinary citizens that all politicians are crooks. It is not true. There are decent, honest, hard-working men and women in every party but their reputation and standing sinks lower every time one of the ANC stars is exposed and the failure of President Ramaphosa to live up to his boasting about fighting corruption and his failure to come clean about this Phala Phala scandal adds fuel to the disillusionment of voters.
One hopes that they will wake up to the fact that in a democracy the way to punish and hold to account politicians who let them down is to vote for a different party. 2024 is around the corner and a new, clean, coalition government could be the answer.
Douglas Gibson is a former opposition chief whip and a former ambassador to Thailand. His website is douglasgibsonsouthafrica.com
This article first appeared in The Star newspaper.
