16 Feb 2015
| Tony Leon | Original Publication: Business Day
Julius Malema has chosen to participate in
Parliament, yet regards himself unbound by its rules and precedents, writes
Tony Leon
THURSDAY night’s debacle in Parliament reminded me of a spectacularly
bad football match. Instead of focusing on the man with the ball, the
spectators’ attention pivots to the activities away from the centrepiece — the
offside players, the deliberate fouls, the baying crowd and the biased referee.
Indeed, even before play commenced for the state of the nation address,
the police water-cannoning of opposition supporters outside Parliament and
arrest of an opposition MP salted the clues for what was to follow. Never mind
the fist in the velvet glove, the country and the world would soon see just the
unfurled fist.
Stripped of subtlety, South African Communist Party boss and Higher
Education Minister Blade Nzimande announced after the melee of storming
policemen and injured MPs, his fist apparently hitting his palm: "We had
to show them who is in charge." And so you did, Blade, so you did.
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| Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema. Picture: PETER MOGAKI |
Indeed, the government’s enchantment, or the enthusiastic security
cohort within it, for all things Chinese was also on display. "The great
firewall of China" — historian Niall Ferguson’s slogan for the communist
government’s blocking of unwanted social media — also descended briefly on
Parliament.
Persons unknown — but one can hazard a guess — jammed cellphone signals
out of the National Assembly. In one of the few clear goals scored by the
opposition on Thursday night, and not on offer in China, Democratic Alliance
chief whip John Steenhuizen invoked the constitution to persuade the speaker to
restore it.
A decade or so ago, the opposition which I then led and the government
of Zuma’s predecessor actually had a debate of sorts, without assistance from
the police. I used the reversible raincoat rhetoric which seemed apt for such
sonorous events as the state of the nation debate. "There’s nothing wrong
with the nation," I declaimed. "It’s the state that’s the
problem." Both before, and especially after, last Thursday both seem to be
in crisis. But how deep is the crisis and what does it tell us, to borrow Will
Hutton’s title of a book of his, "the state that we’re in"?
The day after the address I received a call from former newspaper editor
Tim du Plessis, a thoughtful veteran of our tumultuous past 30 years of
history-in-the-making. After agreeing that the last rites being read by some
for our fledgling democracy were a mite premature, he reminded me of a brutal
page from our recent past. It was in that most fateful of years, 1993, between
the assassination of Chris Hani in April and the finalisation of the interim
constitution in November. One June morning at the World Trade Centre in Kempton
Park, the buffoonish but sinister Eugene Terre’Blanche and his Afrikaner
Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) right-wing forces invaded the talks venue with an
armoured car and men on horseback. The latter-day burghers succeeded in
smashing part of the glazed façade of the conference centre, and, for a while,
took charge as delegates scurried to safety.
Du Plessis noted that, on that afternoon, everything seemed far more at
risk than it did after last Thursday night. I then remembered that my late
predecessor, Zach de Beer, told our delegates’ group that he doubted
"whether even the Archangel Gabriel, were he to descend among us, could
reason and restore peace between the government and its right-wing foes".
In far more earthly and recent form than the archangel, the country
noted the failure of Pastor Ray McCauley to repair relations between the
African National Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose
tactics bear more than a passing resemblance to the fascists of the AWB.
Of course, history now records that, as with other right-wing ruses of
that time, the sound and fury and the real fear invoked by them did little to
retard the momentum of the process they tried in vain to stop.
But there are other big differences between then and now, which offer a
less reassuring prospect for the future. First, there is the biggest disrupter
of all, Julius Malema and his EFF. Business thought leader Clayton Christensen
of Harvard Business School has written an entire book, The Innovator’s Dilemma,
on the power of disruption. Or, how bad and cheap products can usurp
long-settled brands and market leaders. One example he cites is how in the
1950s, the cheap and tinny and initially bad-quality Japanese transistor radio
in short time overwhelmed the established radiograms of my grandmother’s era,
which would soon disappear entirely from the shelves.
In some ways, the EFF is a classic disrupter. But unlike the AWB, Malema
has chosen to participate in Parliament, yet appears to regard himself unbound
by its rules, conventions and precedents. Strip away, for a moment, Zuma’s
ducking and diving on the Nkandla questions and the shield offered to him by
speaker Baleka Mbete and the way she puts the opposition to the sword. How
should Malema’s disruptions be dealt with in a parliamentary democracy, where
the rules of robust engagement are not a licence to pillage parliamentary
privilege and bring down the House?
Presumably, and perhaps fatefully, the speaker and her party colleagues
decided to confuse means and ends. Parliament and the people who elect it are
indeed entitled to demand proper debate and not the one-trick-pony antics of
serial disrupters. But when armed heavies, signal jamming and the full
apparatus of the PW Botha iron fist are unleashed, then it may be said that
they "destroy better than they know".
Or perhaps they — the current rulers — know only too well and simply do
not care, which brings us to the second fork in the road set out at Kempton
Park in 1993. Although the parliamentary building, even the Tuynhuys
presidential office next door, were designed to the architectural
specifications of PW Botha, the democratic furniture of our new order was cut
from new and radically different cloth. We were meant, among other things, to
replace the culture of authority with that of persuasion; democracy in place of
brute force. Yet what was unveiled on Thursday night was far too reminiscent of
the old era and seemed to bury the new.
But one group of people who have powers in the new era they never
possessed in the old is the judiciary. Conspicuously, as armed police entered
the chamber, Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng exited it. One of the judges
president present was also reported as shouting at a policeman: "If you’re
armed you had better get out of here." The chastened policeman duly left.
In such small events we can derive some comfort.
Perhaps even more extraordinary was the very public demand of Malema
that he be treated as a liberal. He demanded of the speaker that she judge his
MPs and their behaviour as "individuals and not as a collective".
Hugo Chavez, his late inspiration, must be spinning in his grave.
Finally, what of the player at the centre of it all? When Zuma finally
rose to speak, he faced an open goal, after so many on his side had netted own
goals. Doctors are confronted with a trick question during training: "What
treatment is offered by ear in an emergency?" The correct answer is,
"words of comfort".
Zuma’s nation had watched the spectacle before he spoke, dismayed and
appalled. He would have scored big had he even alluded to it and, as the man at
the apex of our now damaged democracy, offered words of comfort, reassurance
and repaired the breach. But he laughed and said not a word about it.
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