SPEECH BY THE MINISTER OF SPORT AND RECREATION SOUTH AFRICA ON THE OCCASION OF THE COUNTER-MOTION OF NO CONFIDENCE ON THE SPEAKER OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, COMRADE BALEKA MBETE: CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, 16 SEPTEMBER 2014.

Madame Speaker

Hounarable Members

Madame Speaker we have since the official opening of the 5th democratic Parliament witnessed black 'mampatile' and make-me-believe antics, sacrilegious, derogating and denigrating conduct to the prestige and decorum of this August House. Beyond any measure, we had to painstakingly contend with the irreparable damage this puerile conduct has done, not only to diminish our standing in society as members of this House, but also tarnishing the image of our beloved country.

Must we sit and watch powerlessly when our institutions are being deliberately undermined and unashamedly destabilised? I don't believe so. Enough is enough!

Mayihlome ihlase Maqabane! Igwala kulo Nina!! Amasi abekwe elangeni Asijiki! The Jik is up!

The African National Congress rejects the Democratic Alliances boy's club motion of no confidence with the contempt it deserves. The DA and its strange bedfellows who are gradually becoming its subjects must never be allowed to attempt running this country by hook or crook without a popular mandate. It is the ANC that has that popular mandate and not this counter-revolution.

The genesis of this counter-revolutionary pseudo forces' grievance is not the implausible failure of the speaker to conduct the business of this August House objectively and with decorum, but the infantile disorder the charlatans are hell-bent to achieve with alacrity.

The African National congress has been given a mandate by the majority of our people to govern. We are duty bound to discharge our historic mission of the total liberation of the people of South Africa from all vestiges of colonial misrule and the residue of apartheid from this site of struggle. We reject this so called motion of no confidence with its patriarchal, sexist attitude, chauvinistic prejudices and superiority complex the colonial masters seek to re-impose on our society. Malibongwe Igama Lamakhosikazi, Wathinta Abafazi Wathint' imbokodo! Nizokufa finish en klaar!

What gives this bunch of losers and hypocrites the audacity to question the ANC deployment policy? The DA wants to lecture us on cadre deployment when, they parachuted Tim Harris, a former DA member of this House to the City of Cape Town as the so called economic advisor to Patricia de Lille. There is no economic advisory; this is DA's patronage of its white fellow over black members of the DA. Peter Harris is there to micro-manage Patricia de Lille and to pursue his narrow white economic interests. I can go on and on about the DA's flawed cadre deployment practices dishing out patronage and renting unsuspecting 'darkies'.

Bringing the DA and the EFF together is a dangerous experiment not to be tried at home. The DA and EFF together are like mixing oil with water! What a monumental disaster! This is the mother of all contradiction in terms of modern democracy and civilised societies!

The two parties have nothing in common but competition over who can be the best in their hatred for the ANC; as they both hate the ANC but for different reasons. The two parties compete frenetically to impress the South African citizenry which between the two pseudo parties performs best as a Mampara of note, a charlatan, demagogue and rabble-rouser!

The South African citizenry is not amused, members are also not astonished. The world is not flabbergasted!

The DA is a white party, a neo-liberal party, a party whose actions resembles dictatorship, a party that is rooted in the shameful colonial history of our country.

(In post apartheid South Africa, there has never been a poignant moment of the re-incarnation of the ghost of apartheid other than the moment when Helen Zille called the people of South Africa refugees in their own country. Sadly she said this about the majority of our people who constitutes 84% of the total population of South Africa).

Since 1994, as the DA as then DP, has been trying unsuccessfully to project itself as our liberator. In this Parliament, this party's squires and oil barons fought every effort of the ANC to transform our country and affirm the historically marginalised who are the majority.

Lately, the party has been on a shopping spree to find a black token who will not threaten the fundamentals of the party - a party established to protect white minority privilege. It has found one such black in the dusty streets of Soweto, and he is still trying to figure out why he is here when decisions are made elsewhere about him.

In its desperation, the DA has tried to appropriate our Nelson Mandela to separate him from the ANC. At the same time, it has attacked one leader of the ANC after another because of its belief that black people are inherently incompetent or corrupt. To the DA, this country was better under apartheid. You the EFF are in bed with a party that if per chance were running our country would have banned trade unions, re-invented apartheid and, banished all African people from the Western Cape. Under DA African people will only be allowed in the Western Cape as migrant laborers.

The African National Congress has done everything humanly possible to nurture and save the self-styled Commander in Chief from falling into wrong hands of counter-revolutionaries; however his dogmatism and exaggerated sense of importance got the better of him. The Gods and ancestors of ANC look down on you, ashamed of your lack of humility and betrayal of the course of struggle. They take solace in the fact that history will absolve us.

The EFF is a conglomeration of ill-disciplined and disgruntled, self-serving demagogues who think they are larger than our movement. The poor may be presented as the motive force for the EFF, but in truth the character of its leadership is of a disgruntled (Savimbi of a special-type) youth looking for shortcuts to social mobility and success in our society. None of its leaders are time tested. None of them are experienced. None of them have a history of struggle and selflessness.

The EFF has one courage that in the ANC will never be acceptable - to lie to our people without a blink of an eye. They say what they know some of our people want to hear. They can afford to do this because they themselves don't believe any of the things they say. Nor do they intend to take any responsibility for any of the promises they make. They tell lies, claiming easy victories.

The EFF is a factory fault of a big movement that the ANC is where some of our members are left out or left behind in our political education programme.

Franz Fanon reminded us that:

"The unprepared ness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps." (Close quote)

Tragic as this may sound, the EFF is one such mishap.

Is the EFF a revolutionary party it claims to be? Is it a left formation that is about to lead our people on a revolutionary path?

The EFF describes its ideology as a concocted mixture of Marxism, Leninism and Fanonism, without any detailed elaboration. Coincidentally, it was Franz Fanon himself who said (to quote him): "The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves." (Close quotes) I believe him! Hogwash of Marxism-Leninism and so-called Fanonism is the worst ideology to imagine in the 21st century.

Somewhere we are told that the EFF is a "vanguard". Then "socialist" and somehow part of the protest movement. This is confusing, if not confused.

It was Lenin (in his Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder) who warned us that the threat to any revolution is not only from the counter revolution of the likes of the not so democratic Democratic Alliance, but also from those who think that they are more revolutionary than the revolution itself.

Except for empty slogans and sound bites, there is nothing of substance that makes the EFF revolutionary.

If the EFF is not revolutionary, then what are they? Are they what Karl Marx described as the lumpen proletariat? In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx gives his description of the lumpen proletariat as follows:

"Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars - in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème." (close quote)

Let the people be the judge. The truth speaks for itself.

Since their election into Parliament, the EFF's conduct has been bordering on hooliganism, being disrupting with the clear intention of rendering this Parliament unworkable and ungovernable. This is their strategy because they have nothing constructive to offer to the country. In every session of Parliament and Provincial Legislatures, they have abused presiding officers. They see parliamentary rules as what they call "unjust laws" that they have committed the EFF in their official documents to defying. Anarchy is their modus operandi.

In one official document, the EFF declares that, and I quote: "The basic programme of the EFF is the complete overthrow of the neo-liberal anti-black state as well as the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes" (close quote). Destabilising our Parliament is intended to serve as a build up towards an EFF led insurrection against a popularly and democratically elected government.

One thing I was taught, and not by Karl Marx or Franz Fanon, but by my own African upbringing and socialisation, is that to be rude and disrespectful has nothing to do with being revolutionary.

To be dressed in red garments does not make one a working class hero, or for that matter a revolutionary.

I leave it to Karl Marx to define what the EFF could be. One thing I know for a fact is that its political programme of economic freedom in our lifetime was stolen from the ANC Youth League. The difference is that in the Youth League, this programme is seen in the context of the National Democratic Revolution; whereas in the EFF, it is clothed in empty rhetoric and political hot air.

We know what the Freedom Front Plus wants - a volkstad. The party lives in the past, with its verkrampte boere Agenda, that is where it belongs, that is where it remains, stuck in the past like the dinosaurs that refused to adapt and faced the harsh reality of extinction.

The Congress of the People Cope (COPE) is but an abandoned ship manned by a lone leader whose only dream is to return to his political home from which he divorced himself. Honourable Terror Lekota has just a monstrous personal ego but the man is down and out hence he chewed the dirty hat after the elections. Only incorrigible and unrehabilitated elements like such renders themselves liabilities to the ANC because they lack political and organisational discipline and suffer from some weird condition diagnosed as uncontrollable leadership ambition and insatiable desire for power. The citizens of Afrika Borwa showed the not so coping COPE that hat munching and eating old hats is no revolutionary act or deed.

UDM is hastily trying not to be outdone in this jamboree, by jumping into the band-wagon of its erstwhile colonial master. Unbeknown to it that the ice-beg of this unholy alliance is melting.

I thank you

Issued by the Ministry of Sport and Recreation, September 16 2014

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