SPEECH BY MICHAEL CARDO MP, DA SHADOW MINISTER OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, 22 NOVEMBER 2016
“A Riotous Assembly”
Honourable Speaker
Riotous Assembly
Twenty-two years after the inauguration of the First Democratic Parliament, we should have eradicated from our statute books all those apartheid-era laws that were used to crush opposition and stifle dissent.
Yet, just the other day, an opposition leader was charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956.
Jimmy Kruger, one of the most vicious apparatchiks of the apartheid state, used this Act to ban all public meetings in the wake of the 1976 Soweto Uprising.
Forty years on, the ANC is now using the tools of the former oppressor to harass and persecute its democratically elected opponents.
This is a scenario so absurd, so ironic and so farcical that – were it not true – it could be the subject of a darkly comic novel.
In fact, had Tom Sharpe been alive today, the author of the 1971 career-launching book, Riotous Assembly, might have used the summons served on Honourable Malema in terms of the Riotous Assemblies Act as the seed of a sequel.
Sharpe would have found it easy to send up the ANC government.
Instead of the blundering but sinister duo of Kommandant Van Heerden and Konstabel Els in the first Riotous Assembly, we would have the blundering but sinister quartet of security cluster Ministers.
Minister of Police, Nathi Nhleko, who covered up for President Zuma in the Nkandla scandal while covering himself in a fire pool of sweat;
Minister of State Security, David ‘Nails’ Mahlobo, who blocked the signal in Parliament, possibly got other things unblocked at a massage parlour owned by someone linked to rhino horn trafficking, and is still deciding whether or not student leader Mcebo Dlamini has ever been to his home;
Minister of Defence, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula who apparently smuggled someone into South Africa with false documents, and under whose watch the whistle-blower on a R10 million Departmental tender scandal has been victimised and pursued by intelligence operatives; and
Minister of Justice, Michael Masutha, who took us out of the International Criminal Court, invited the supposedly independent National Director of Public Prosecutions, Shaun Abrahams, to Luthuli House ahead of Minister Pravin Gordhan being charged, and who somehow found himself in the bathroom during the no-confidence vote in President Zuma.
Apartheid-era laws
This bumbling amateurishness coupled with menacing underhandedness has become a hallmark of the security cluster.
We are witnessing the re-securitisation of public life by securocrats and idiocrats. And apartheid-era legislation has become a weapon in their arsenal. They use laws that violate the constitutional values of freedom, transparency and accountability.
The National Key Points Act of 1980, for example, was used to shield the President from scrutiny over Nkandla.
Research by the Freedom of Expression Institute and the Wits Centre for Applied Legal Studies has shown that apartheid laws restricting access to information and media freedom continue to languish on the statute books.
In 2008, the SA Law Commission announced that it was embarking on a major review of the 2 800 laws enacted since 1910. The aim was to repeal laws that were discriminatory or conflicted with the Constitution.
Eight years later, Parliament has still not brought this process to completion.
National security laws still confer wide powers on the president and cabinet to keep certain information secret.
For example, Section 118(1) (b) of the National Defence Act of 1957 forbids the publication of any statement, comment or rumour relating to any activity of the South African Defence Force that is calculated to “prejudice or embarrass the government in its foreign relations or to alarm or depress members of the public”.
Ministers Mashabane and Nqakula could have a field day with that.
A raft of other apartheid-era legislative provisions contravene our right of access to information, such as:
The Armaments Development and Production Act 57 of 1968;
The National Supplies Procurement Act 89 of 1970;
The Petroleum Products Act 120 of 1977;
And, of course, the Protection of Information Act 84 of 1982, which is being replaced by the totalitarian Secrecy Bill.
Send them to the scrapheap
It is time to relegate these laws to the scrapheap. It is time to reject rule by securocrats and idiocrats, which is a hangover from our dark past.
In 1994, we were meant to move from a closed, authoritarian autocracy to an open, egalitarian democracy.
But the ANC government – and especially its security cluster in cabinet – seems to want to stall that movement.
This is just madness.
As the central character in Sharpe’s Riotous Assembly, Miss Hazelstone, says to her doctor:
‘Madness is so monotonous…You would think that fantasies would be more interesting, but really one has to conclude that insanity is a poor substitute for reality.’
