Mbete ignores EFF court threat
Economic Freedom Fighters MPs have to wait another day to know if National Assembly speaker Baleka Mbete will back down on her threat to dock their salaries.
The threat was in response to their disruption of parliamentary proceedings with chants of "pay back the money" at President Jacob Zuma last month.
The MPs had given Mbete until noon yesterday to withdraw her threat, failing which they would go to court. She missed the deadline.
Mbete wrote to the 25 MPs, including EFF party leader Julius Malema, on Tuesday saying that she planned to ask parliament to suspend them for 14 days without pay.
She gave them until Friday to give her reasons why they should not be suspended.
The drama in parliament resulted from the EFF's dissatisfaction with Zuma's response about when he was going to pay back the money for the upgrades at his Nkandla home - as recommended by public protector Thuli Madonsela.
The EFF dismissed her allegations that they had created a "disturbance within the precincts of parliament while the House was meeting" as vague and vexatious.
But Leon Manuel, from the office of the state attorney, informed Malema's lawyer Luvuyo Godla, that Mbete had not been able to respond to the EFF yesterday.
"Our instruction is that the speaker will respond during the course of tomorrow," said Manuel.
He said this could not prejudice the EFF legislators since the House would only sit tomorrow afternoon. But Godla was not pleased and signalled the party might approach the court today.
"I refuse to accede to the state attorney's request. His client [Mbete] has an option to withdraw her intentions otherwise I am formulating my papers in preparation to go to court," said Godla.
Commenting on the EFF threat to go to court, political analyst Somadoda Fikeni said: "To some extent the litigation is good but you don't want to have the judiciary burdened with things that parliament could easily have dealt with. It is good because the court will clarify some unclear parliamentary codes of conduct."