Publication: Business Day Issued: Date: 2008-01-24 Reporter: John Kane-Berman

Ominous Noises from this 'Democracy in Action' 

 

Publication 

Business Day
Date 2008-01-24
Reporter John Kane-Berman
Web Link www.bday.co.za

 

Nobody should have been surprised when President Thabo Mbeki interfered with due process of law by suspending the national director of public prosecutions, Vusi Pikoli, in September, in an attempt to shield national police commissioner Jackie Selebi from arrest and prosecution.

This was the same Mbeki who torpedoed Parliament's standing committee on public accounts in 2001, when it tried to investigate the arms deal of which he was the major sponsor. Mbeki also interfered with the joint investigation into the arms deal by the auditor-general, the national director of public prosecutions and the public protector.

This behaviour undermines the administration of justice, or institutions set up under the constitution, or both. The opposition can now hardly avoid proposing a vote of no confidence in Mbeki when Parliament reconvenes next month. *1

Carried by a simple majority, such a motion would automatically bring down the government. Neither the Democratic Alliance nor any other opposition party would necessarily wish such a motion to succeed, since one consequence could be the assumption of power by someone facing a possible criminal trial *2.

That is a risk worth running to make the point *3 ­ dramatically ­ that presidents who seek to put themselves above the law are unfit to remain in office.

A motion of no confidence would of course put the African National Congress (ANC) on the spot. ANC MPs could hardly give the opposition the satisfaction of helping precipitate the fall of the government. So the ANC would have to swallow hard and keep the unwanted Mbeki in office. Given the colossal defeat delivered to Mbeki in Polokwane last month, the party would look not only hypocritical but also ridiculous in voting to retain him in office.

In ousting Mbeki from the party leadership, the Polokwane conference has been hailed as democracy in action. Perhaps. But the demands coming out of ANC headquarters at Luthuli House are ominous. So are some of the responses from the executive and legislative branches of government.

The ANC has thus demanded that the Scorpions be disbanded, and the director-general of justice and constitutional development says they will be. Apart from the dubious merits of the case, what is objectionable here is that the party dictates and a senior civil servant obliges. So, evidently, will Parliament, for Baleka Mbete, currently both ANC chairwoman and speaker of the National Assembly, has confirmed that the ANC's June deadline for disbanding the Scorpions is "do-able" by Parliament.

Mathews Phosa, the treasurer-general of the ANC, wrote in the Financial Mail that "the president and his cabinet account to the NEC (national executive committee) of the ANC, as any other structure of government does".

Said another NEC member, quoted anonymously in Business Day: "All our cadres in government are deployed by the ANC and can be recalled if need be."

Accordingly, the ANC is demanding that its deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, be appointed as a deputy president of the country.

What we have here are not "two centres of power" in contest, but a determination to ensure that from now on there is only one centre of power: Luthuli House.

In Phosa's words: "In practice there is only one centre of power and that is the highest decision-making structures of the ANC." The ANC is clearly determined to turn both Parliament and the cabinet into subcommittees of the ruling party.

What the ANC wants is subversive of the constitution itself *4, for that document vests legislative authority in Parliament, subject only to the constitution. The constitution also makes the members of the cabinet accountable to Parliament.

To make them accountable instead to the majority party is to undermine both our multiparty system and parliamentary democracy itself. In short, what the ANC has in mind is nothing less than to exhume the Soviet model of government and impose it on our political system.

* Kane-Berman is CE of the South African Institute of Race Relations

With acknowledgements to John Kane-Berman and Business Day.


*1       Do it.
It's your responsibility.


*2      This is not someone facing a possible criminal trial; this is someone facing a criminal trial on 4 August 2008.

*3      Not just to make the point, but to get rid of a serial liar and disingenious manipulator who has ruined the country.

*4       Subversion of the constitution is sedition.