THERE were Nyalas and a water cannon on Church Square, neatly parked behind the statue of “Onze Jan” Hofmeyer. A razor wire barricade trailer was standing by at the Spin Street entrance to the parliamentary district. Parts of Plein Street was closed to traffic. 

At 120 Plein St, the so-called parliamentary visitors’ centre, I had to convince a massive cop that I was duly entitled to enter the building to collect my press gallery ticked for the afternoon. He wanted to see all sorts of badges and passes, which of course, I don’t have, being a freelance writer. 

In the end he relented, and ordered a cop to escort me all of six metres through the x-ray screening gate to the very same reception desk and the very same woman who on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon had looked up from her lunch, wiped the grease from her fingers, flicked through my ID document, and scribbled out the pass which allowed me to proceed to the office where I could pick up my ticket to the press gallery. Each time she said the same thing, “If you know where to go, it’s fine with me.”

There is always a massive goon squad presence when Jacob Zuma is scheduled to do something here. And so it was with the President’s response to the debate on his State of the Nation Address.

The delivery was the same lumpy, clunking shambles it has always been. It was like watching a man spit wet sawdust from his mouth. Long. Pauses. Between. Phrases. And then awkward moments. Of silence. While he ruminated. On the best course of navigation through the coming. Sentences.

But there was something new about the manner of this delivery. This time last year, Zuma was combative and testy, a man who emerged from his corner, both arms swinging, to take on his critics.

Yesterday, he ignored them completely and instead doled out avuncular pleasantries, thanking those opposition MPs who, he felt, had made a valid contribution to the debate. 

A genial uncle. But not, mind you, the sort of uncle to be found in Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson’s family, the one who’s always drunk and complaining about cheap wine.

No, a sage, folksy kind of guy who knows that a considerate pleasantry here and there just goes that much further than the sort of contumely and invective and bile and scorn that had been directed his way the previous two days.

And, more importantly, a relaxed uncle, one perhaps greatly relieved that the Economic Freedom Fighters weren’t in the chamber.

Even the heckling, when it came, following Zuma’s by-now customary departures from his prepared text, seemed subdued and limp.

Take, for instance, his customary winner-take-all version of democracy. 

“At times,” he said, “people think of the ills they have, it is government only who must deal with it. It is all of us who must deal with it . . . that government at the time would be the government elected by the majority, which is carrying the wishes and dreams of the majority of the country. That is the A, B, C of democracy.”

Cue polite applause from the ANC benches – and a lone desultory, mocking voice from the ranks of the DA: “Tell us about the D and E.”

“That is the A, B, C of democracy,” Zuma continued. “Majority prevails.”

“Remember that when you lose Nelson Mandela Bay [in the municipal elections],” came another retort.

The President paid no attention. “Uh, we must find solutions,” he continued, “that will push back poverty, inequality and unemployment. . .”

The closest thing to a rebuke in his speech was his call to parties to conduct themselves with more respect in Parliament and to stop insulting each other and the presiding officers.

Many MPs however felt the presiding officers deserved a rebuke of their own, especially National Council of Provinces deputy chair Raseriti Tau.

***

It is worth recalling Tau's performance on Wednesday when Cope leader Mosiuoa Lekota began his speech. It resulted in the brief expulsion from the chamber of DA Chief Whip John Steenhuisen and an idiotic ruling that the terms “rubbish” and “faction” were unparliamentary.

Lekota had been allotted a mere four minutes to speak. Even so, ANC MPs weren’t going to make it easy for him, and he was greeted by jeers from the get-go.

This was upped several notches to outraged howls when Lekota began speaking of factions within the ruling party. One ANC backbencher called out, “Factions? Are you calling us factions?”

Tau ruled the term out of order. “We don’t have factions in Parliament,” he said.

The opposition were a bit stunned at that, and there came a collective startled guppy moment as jaws dropped. 

“There’s nothing unparliamentary about ‘faction’,” Steenhuisen pointed out. “Every time you are in the chair this happens. . .”

Tau insisted the term was “disparaging” and could cause “confusion”.

Steenhuisen was furious. “You’re talking complete rubbish now!”

“Can you withdraw from that?”

“What? Are you saying ‘rubbish’ is unparliamentary now?”

Tau apparently was. He repeated his instruction to Steenhuisen, who replied, “I will not withdraw the word ‘rubbish’ because you are talking rubbish.”

With that Steenhuisen was ordered out the chamber. By now, though, opposition MPs were up in arms, shouting at Tau, “Rubbish! Rubbish!” Moments later, the entire DA caucus was asked to leave. They ignore Tau.

ANC Chief Whip Stone Sizani tried to help. “Mr Chair, the real culprit behind this behaviour of the DA is Mr Chair. . .” He maybe meant Maimane but, as slips go, most of the chamber thought it amusing.

Tau remained intractable, and insisted that he was offended at being told he was speaking rubbish. DA MPs shouted back, “But you were!”

“Let me remind the House,” he whined, not for the first time, “to not engage in words that might be found interpretative . . . and my ruling on these kinds of words stands.”

Once a semblance of order had been restored, Lekota continued with his speech. “One faction [in Parliament] is made up of two or three parties with the presiding officers, and a smaller faction is trying keep the executive accountable.”

He’d no sooner said this when Tau told him that his time was up. Lekota protested that he still had two-and-a-half minutes, but Tau was having none of that and Lekota made his way back to his seat shaking his head in disbelief.

But the DA were not yet done with Tau or indeed factions. 

In his speech, Gauteng NCOP member Jacques Julius told Tau, “I have to remind you that your biased behaviour can sometimes put you in a corner.”

Then Julius touched on the discord between Zuma and Gauteng premier David Makhura. “Talk of factions,” he said, “or rather fractions. . .” 

He went on to deliver the debate’s best insult, calling Joemat-Pettersson “Popeye”. And trust me, after her screeching rambling address earlier in the afternoon, it was a cruelly telling jibe.

One person who wasn’t going to take a dig from Julius lying down was Lindiwe Sisulu, the Human Settlements Minister. Swathed in purple and dripping jewellery, she rose to object to his suggestion that she was “loaded with money”.

“But you are!” opposition MPs heckled.

“This is not true!” she said. “It’s absolute rubbish!”

The “R” word sparked yet another round of objections, with one wag calling out from the floor, “Can you call in the bouncers to remove her?”

“I will withdraw the ‘rubbish’,” Sisulu replied, “but I have been insulted. You cannot allow a blatant lie to continue.”

Mangosuthu Buthelezi slowly rose on a point of order. Was the honourable Julius referring to the President when he spoke of “this man”?

“It’s been an emotional time,” Julius replied. “I might have, I might not have. . .”

Worse was to come, as Julius described David van Rooyen, the “weekend special” who briefly replaced Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene, as a “political dwarf”.

Tau was about to make a ruling on that, when the DA’s Mike Waters pointed out that this was not unparliamentary as it was metaphorical. And so another DA chant went up, “It’s a metaphor! It’s a metaphor!” 

Julius was asked to withdraw the metaphor.

“I will withdraw what you want me to withdraw,” Julius repled, “but I will add that he’s an honourable political dwarf.”

Then came the strange news of EFF commander in chief Julius Malema’s foreskin, courtesy of the Deputy Minister in the Presidency, Buti Manamela.

He had started his allotted 25 minutes with a meandering tale about how his grandfather had swapped his World War Two pension bicycle for a donkey – a “one trick pony,” he called it – the exact relevance of which was lost on the House.

Then he began talking about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which seemed an interesting segue – Lindiwe Sisula as the Queen of Hearts, Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor as the Caterpillar, Ebrahim Patel and Rob Davies as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and so on.

But it soon became clear that Manamela hadn’t read Lewis Carroll's book at all. (He thought of Alice as being quite delusional.)

Then he launched his attack on the absent Malema. “In Limpopo, where I come from,” he said, “any man who repeats a conversation between two men is not brave at all. He is a coward who thrives on noise and gossip.”

This was a reference to Malema’s speech on Tuesday in which he revealed that Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula [then deputy police minister] had pleaded with him not to campaign for Zuma to replace Thabo Mbeki as ANC president.

Malema told the House: “Mbalula [then deputy minister of police] called me from the mountain to say I must not participate in that process. When I was a friend with minister of sports‚ he received a call from the Guptas and they told him that he will be [sports] minister.”

This was in 2008 and Mbalula, you may recall, was at “the mountain” because he had allegedly been kidnapped by, among others ANC NEC member Tony Yengeni, and forced to undergo traditional circumcision.

Manamela criticised the “boy” Malema for revealing details of this private conversation – but then did much the same thing when he spoke of the then ANC Youth League president’s squeamish reluctance to enter Mbalula’s “mountain”.

As he put it, “The honourable leader of the red brigade did not want to go in to see Mbalula because he was not prepared to compromise his boyhood and did not know what would happen to him at that point in time. Now where is the bravery in that?”

Where indeed. But it’s important to remember that, were MPs to follow the President’s suggestion and stop insulting one another, these tales would be lost to us. 

How poor would our world be then?