Speaker of Parliament, Ms Baleka Mbete, increasingly looks like Cruella de Vil. She is a disgrace and should be impeached along with President Jacob Zuma who refuses to attend Parliament, and whom she protects, like a manic lynx. Attendance in Parliament is one of the most important duties of his office, yet he remains missing in action.
Mbete's hostility towards the opposition is palpable as confirmed by her retort "I do not wish to recognize you". An EFF member begs to be recognized eight times, yet Mbete ignores her showing very clearly that she fears the EFF; she fears John Steenhuizen, DA Chief Whip; she fears Dianne Kohler-Barnard; she fears mainly those who do not fear her.
If Ms Mbete were a president, she would be a dictator. She possesses all the requisite qualities of a tyrant, which is to hate the truth, detest transparency; and abhor debate. Worse, she makes the apartheid Parliament look like a tea party in comparison.
Even her ANC colleagues are embarrassed by her inability to control the House if their body language and facial expressions are anything to go by. They are reluctant to intervene lest they be viewed as sexist. They also know the honourable JZ is watching them on television and would deal with his detractors accordingly.
Mbete and her fellow deputy speakers embody the antithesis of what Parliament represents. Lest she forgets, it is the citadel for the contestation of ideas. It is the bastion where national dialogue is transacted amongst our representatives on our behalf. And when she said on television that her job is to "protect the image and dignity of parliament" her spectacular inability to reflect on how she has damaged the "image and dignity" of the legislature, is glaringly obvious.
Freedom of speech and opposition are so terrifying that as leader of the House she will not hesitate to crush dissent using the police, a lesser arm of State to act against the State. She has no respect for the sovereignty of parliament and is giving us a taste of what would happen should the ANC lose at the polls.
This is the very reason gun ownership is a constitutional right in the USA - to protect the citizens from the tyranny of the State. Lest we forget, former President Mbeki was the architect of the reduction in question time for presidents to once per term and we see now the consequences of what Mbeki has started, Zuma has perfected with aplomb.
He simply refuses to appear knowing that he can master the legislature by remote control. Feared as much by his absence as his presence, ANC MPs behave like lame ducks, obsequious, sycophantic, and simply pathetic, their greatest legacy thus far being the creation of a monumentally dysfunctional and redundant Parliament.
Appropriately called "Parliamonium" by the twitter brigade, this debacle took me back to a chapter I wrote, entitled Why Parliamentary Opposition is Essential to Democracy, in the book: Opposing Voices: Liberalism and Opposition in South Africa Today, edited by Milton Shain, in which I refer to an ANC policy document entitled Strategic and Tactical Approaches to Opposition.
An avowedly anti-opposition policy "it is the very antithesis of what all political science textbooks ... agree is the central job of opposition" - to hold the ruling party accountable to the legislature - not the other way around. This seminal function however is seen as a subversive activity - by "counter-revolutionary forces" - that should be reined in.
Ironically that book was written when opposition was mostly white. Our burgeoning non-racial and vibrant opposition has become more of a direct threat to the ANC's centralized control than ever before and how best to stifle critique, is to bring in the riot police.
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
