EDITORIAL: National Assembly reverts to bovine predictability

It was all so predictable. The manner in which ANC MPs rallied around President Cyril Ramaphosa during a special sitting of the National Assembly on Tuesday to vote on the independent panel report on the Phala Phala affair was almost a farce.

The outcome of the vote on whether Ramaphosa should be subjected to an impeachment process was a foregone conclusion as ANC MPs had been instructed by party bosses, on pain of losing their comfortable parliamentary positions, to vote against the report of the panel chaired by retired chief justice Sandile Ngcobo. Allegations were also made during the sitting that MPs had been threatened with death if they voted in favour of impeachment. A complaint about this has been lodged with the police. 

The panel found there may be a prima facie case against Ramaphosa for violating the constitution and his oath of office with regard to the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars from a sofa at his Phala Phala game farm.

The only exceptions to the herd-like voting were a motley bunch that included co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, former North West premier Supra Mahumapelo, Mervyn Dirks, a member of the radical economic transformation faction of the ANC, and Mosebenzi Zwane, who is among the accused in the Estina dairy farm case.

Lindiwe Sisulu, who has been open about her opposition to Ramaphosa and had indicated she would vote in favour of the impeachment, was notably absent from the vote.

The poor ANC turnout for the yes vote was counter to claims ahead of the sitting that more than 30 ANC MPs had confirmed they would vote in favour of an impeachment process.

As the voting took place individually by way of a roll call, there was no place for ANC MPs to hide. This was why EFF leader Julius Malema and African Transformation Movement leader Vuyo Zungile, among others, pleaded until the 11th hour for National Assembly speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula to change her mind and agree to voting by way of a secret ballot, which they said was the only way to protect MPs from intimidation. But the speaker refused, sticking to the roll call voting system in the interest of what she described as “openness and transparency”.

The outcome of the vote means Ramaphosa is in the clear insofar as submitting himself to a parliamentary impeachment process is concerned. His position going into the ANC national conference, which starts on Friday, is strengthened — and will be further bolstered if the Constitutional Court were to find the panel’s report fatally flawed and invalid, as Ramaphosa has asked it to do. The vote by the National Assembly against an impeachment process would have been more credible had it followed on the judgment of the Constitutional Court.

The result of the vote also means that Ramaphosa will not have to answer the many unanswered questions surrounding the Phala Phala theft, answers he has kept close to his chest for months, and which he may have been forced to answer during a parliamentary impeachment inquiry.

But while the result might have spared the president from such a probe, uncertainty will continue to prevail until the outcome of all the other investigations by the likes of the Hawks, the public protector and the Reserve Bank are known.

We have seen herd-like voting play out before in the face of scandal — for example, during the Nkandla saga when ANC MPs came to the defence of former president Jacob Zuma. Their relentless failure to hold the president and government to account during the state capture years was spotlighted by the Zondo commission’s report, which criticised the way parliament abandoned its constitutional duties in order to protect the president.

The failure is one of the system itself, in which MPs are beholden to the parties that place them on their election lists and can remove them at the slightest hint of disobedience of the party line. It will only be remedied when the system of proportional representation is combined with a constituency-based system of electing MPs who are then directly accountable to the electorate. This was also recommended in the Zondo commission report.