The Big Read: EFF merely stirring the ashes

Cast your mind back to August 2008. President Thabo Mbeki had been unseated as ANC president eight months before.

The party was at the same time going all out to ensure that its new president, Jacob Zuma, did not go to court to answer charges of corruption.

At its conference in December 2007, in Polokwane, the party had taken a decision to disband the feared independent investigative unit, the Scorpions.

The party had reason to fear the Scorpions: not only was Zuma investigated by it, but many MPs who had defrauded parliament through the Travelgate scam had been stung by it.

The issue of the disbanding of the Scorpions went to parliament. Even before public hearings were opened, Maggie Sotyu, then ANC chairman of parliament's portfolio committee on safety and security, said parliament's job was to "implement the policies of the ruling party" and stated categorically: "We are going to dissolve the Scorpions."

What followed was a sham process of consultation, exposed by the media several times, and finally the disbanding of the Scorpions. Where was parliament then? Where was its oversight role? Why was the overwhelming public view that the Scorpions be retained ignored?

Frank Chikane, the director-general in Mbeki's office at the time, writes in his Eight Days in September about Mbeki's removal from office in September 2008.

He writes about the ANC's decision to get Mbeki removed hastily, without according parliament the right to reflect on the matter. The institution was merely used to legitimise an ANC party decision.

Within 24 hours of the Economic Freedom Fighters bringing the National Assembly to a juddering stop on Thursday by chanting "Pay Back the Money!" at Zuma, the ANC had released three press statements on the issue.

"EFF a threat to democracy," screamed the headline on one release. Another, issued by the office of ANC chief whip Stone Sizani, howled: "Such abhorrent conduct ought to be shunned by all those who value our hard-fought [for] multiparty system of parliament[ary] and constitutional democracy. What has transpired today, as with other such acts that occurred previously, is not a political challenge to the ANC but a clear attack on legitimate democratic institutions with an aim of undermining the democratic values upon which our country is founded."

In the same period ANC leaders such as Gwede Mantashe called in to radio stations and spewed venom about how the EFF was attacking the institution that is parliament.

They may be right, of course, because they know EFF leader Julius Malema better than most of us. After all, they reared him, fed him, educated him and unleashed him on the country.

It was lovely to hear the ANC standing up for the integrity of parliament so robustly. But the party's conduct in parliament, particularly since 2008, once again shows that it is being mealy-mouthed on these issues.

For the first time the ANC is faced with a situation in which it is being challenged on its relationship to parliament.

In the past, parliament has been used by the party not as a means of ensuring that the executive accounts to the people. Instead, the executive has used parliament to rubber-stamp rampant corruption and abject failure in the delivery of services.

It has not been a parliament of the people but a parliament of the ANC's national working committee, there to implement edicts of party bosses.

Probably the best example of this is when the ANC ignored widespread condemnation of the heinous Protection of State Information Bill and ordered its MPs to vote for it.

When party veteran Ben Turok and MP Gloria Borman refused to support it, they were disciplined.

In another incident, angry ANC MPs sympathetic to the disgraced former communications minister Dina Pule attacked Turok and Lemias Mashile, part of the party's parliamentary ethics team, which found her guilty of failing to declare her knowledge of her boyfriend's interests in her department's tenders.

Pule was fired but ANC MPs lined up to embrace her, despite the fact that she lied to parliament and the nation.

Which parliament, therefore, has the EFF violated by demanding that Zuma stop his obfuscation and answer directly on one issue: When will you pay back the Nkandla money? The Nkandla story has been with us since 2009. In that time Zuma has used ministers and parliament to avoid accountability.

Last week he did the same, claiming that the matter had been referred to the relevant authorities. By this he means that he has forwarded the matter to the police minister - a man he has appointed - to decide.

Zuma has made a mockery of parliament and many of our constitutionally enshrined institutions. He has destroyed the Scorpions and is currently systematically wrecking the public protector's office.

Parliament? That institution was undermined by the ANC ages ago. The EFF is merely shuffling through its ashes.