EFF statement on parliament bouncers’ assault dress rehearsal
5 August 2015
The EFF has learnt that members of the new division of the Parliamentary Protection Services specializing in bouncer functions is currently in a dress rehearsal on how they plan to assault members of the EFF during the questions session with Zuma tomorrow. This new division is composed of members of the SAPS who were used earlier this year to assault members of EFF during the state of the nation address.
The EFF would like to reiterate that it will never be intimidated by all these efforts by the ANC controlled parliament to use force and protect Zuma against a question. We shall never retreat from our determination to ask critical questions and also demand Zuma to respect parliament, the Public Protector and the constitution.
Nothing, including unjust rules of parliament will stop us. The EFF has always said it will defy unjust laws and any rule designed to suppress opposition from holding the executive accountable which is unconstitutional and unjust and will be met with defiance from the EFF benches.
We offer free advice to the Speaker of parliament that she must come prepared to tell Zuma to answer the question as to when is he going to pay back the money unduly spent in Nkandla. The ANC has manipulated all other opposition parties into agreeing to bury the Public Protector’s report and have parliament go on as of its business as usual. They have done this by convincing them to participate in a legally baseless Ad Hoc Committee to subject the Public Protectors report to an illegitimate scrutiny led by Zuma’s garden boy Minister Nhleko. This has produced an undesirable situation of the delay of justice, and justice delayed is justice denied.
The opposition does not realize that this is precisely why for the past twenty one years before EFF’s arrival in parliament, the public never paid attention to parliament. A parliament that is mocked by the executive, that cannot be respected by the president and that takes centuries to do justice is a weak and sleeping parliament. A parliament that knows how to speedily invent corporal punishment laws but fails to speedily get a president who has unduly spent millions of public money to pay them back as per the Public Protector’s remedial actions is a sleeping parliament. The ANC wants parliament to return to the deep sleep it was in, utterly toothless and a mere playground for their corrupt executives and president. They have even colluded with the other opposition parties to invent corporal punishment. This is how far the ANC is willing to go to return parliament to deep sleep.
The EFF will never agree to sleep, it is not going to take the opium of long and illegitimate processes. Instead we shall act in the full force of the urgency of now because we are in an abnormal situation of open defiance of independent state institutions as well as the courts, including politically motivated police brutality from Marikana, Mothutlung, Relela and now right inside parliament. The ANC is defying court orders, rubbishing the reports and office of the Public Protector, as well as the entire judiciary, producing a situation of general disregard of institutions law and the rule of law. Baleka Mbete is even on record saying Zuma is not equal to all of us in society.
The last free advice we want to give is to Zuma himself that he must come prepared tomorrow because from the red benches of the EFF will be an uncompromising voice in defense of the rule of law which will tell him in no equivocal terms to pay back the money.
Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, August 5 2015
