Cape Town — With Friday’s showdown in the African National Congress (ANC) national executive committee looming, President Thabo Mbeki will have a dress rehearsal in Parliament on Thursday when he is grilled by MPs over the Jacob Zuma affair in presidential question time.

Mbeki and Zuma will reportedly come face to face in the national executive committee on Friday when Mbeki tries to persuade the party’s top decision-making body to allow a commission of inquiry into allegations that he has been leading a conspiracy intended to get rid of Zuma as a potential leader of both the party and the country.

The proposal has already been rejected by the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party.

In Paliarment Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon will ask Mbeki whether or not he has received requests to reinstate Zuma as deputy president of the country.

He will also ask if representations have been made to have the charges against Zuma dropped and, if so, who made them.

Mbeki fired Zuma as deputy president of SA after Schabir Shaik was convicted of having a corrupt relationship with him.

Leon’s question will open the debate on the floor and Mbeki will then have to answer five follow-up questions.

Meanwhile, the DA has urged that Parliament’s rules committee should discuss speaker Baleka Mbete’s decision not to allow a question on the arms deal to be put to Mbeki.

The question was about Mbeki’s alleged meeting with arms deal company Thomson-CSF.

DA chief whip Douglas Gibson said he had written to Mbete asking her to refer to the rules committee about her decision to disallow the question.

Mbete ruled last month that it had failed to be “a question that complies with the criteria of international or national importance”. With I-Net Bridge

With acknowledgements to Wyndham Hartley and the Business Day.