ANC WILL NOT STAND IDLY BY AS DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS ARE ATTACKED
26 August 2014
The Office of the ANC Chief Whip rejects suggestions from some analysts and commentators seeking to pin the blame for the eruption of hooliganism on Thursday on the Speaker of the National Assembly and the President. A misinformation being peddled here is that because the Speaker comes from the ANC, she is biased and acted to protect the President from accountability. On the other hand, the fabrication goes on to allege that the President failed to respond sufficiently to the question hence the rowdy behaviour.
It is the tragedy of our public discourse that the anti-Zuma prejudices all the time seem to trump principle. An outrageous conduct that would ordinarily be roundly condemned by all sensible South Africans is excused and justified because it is directed at a figure some section of our public commentators and the media dislike. Suddenly we see our public critics burying their heads in the sand, seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil on matters of principle. Similarly, we see those who have repeatedly failed to unseat the ANC through democratic elections over the last 20 years unsurprisingly now applauding an attempt to destroy legitimate democratic institutions with a hope to weaken a democratically elected government.
Because some section of the media, some pundits and opposition have joined forces to publicly glorify the blatant acts of unruliness that played out in the Assembly, even an institution supporting democracy jumps onto the bandwagon to surf on the populist wave. An earlier constitutionally sound principle in which Parliament would have been the decider on the adequacy of the President's response is inexplicably and conveniently abandoned because the wave of media opinion now faces a certain direction.
We therefore wish to deal with this misinformation through the following facts: