134 votes.

That’s all that the Democratic Alliance (DA) maintained would be necessary to compel the speaker of Parliament to establish an ad hoc committee to look into the impeachment of President Jacob Zuma. 134 votes; in other words, the support of just one-third of the MPs in the National Assembly.

That doesn’t mean the president would be impeached at the end of the process. It just means that a committee can write a report about the prospect. In order to actually remove a sitting president from office via a vote in the National Assembly, the support of two-thirds of MPs is required. Such a vote can only happen if there has been a serious violation of the Constitution or law; serious misconduct; or an inability to perform the duties of the president’s office.

The DA argued that a sufficiently serious violation of law to warrant an impeachment motion took place when Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir was allowed to leave the country despite a court order mandating his arrest.

Naturally, with the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) majority in Parliament, such a motion would never pass – the ANC has 249 seats in the National Assembly. But the possibility of the opposition getting together 134 votes to force the establishment of an impeachment committee was altogether more plausible.

The DA has 89 votes, so there was no prospect of the party getting there alone. The second-largest opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), holds 25 votes. With the combined votes of the DA, the EFF, and the smaller opposition parties, the target of 134 votes could have been reached.

But the days of parliamentary cooperation between the DA and EFF are well and truly gone. It took less than half an hour in the National Assembly on Tuesday for the two parties to begin hurling insults at each other. DA chief whip John Steenhuisen termed the EFF “the nasty party” for its MPs’ objection to a motion of condolence to mark the death of DA MP Kenneth Mubu. It wasn’t personal – the EFF now objects to every motion raised by other parties, as a form of retaliation for the new rules adopted earlier this year which allow for MPs to be removed from the National Assembly if they are disruptive.

This stonewalling from the EFF has little practical impact. But one effect it does have is that the families of those who are being mourned in Parliament, or those who are being celebrated – such as South African athletes returning from Beijing with medals – are not sent a certificate of recognition from Parliament, and the motions are not recorded in Hansard, the official record of Parliament.

There was a rare moment of accord between the DA, ANC and smaller opposition parties on Tuesday when Steenhuisen urged the EFF to show some “human decency” and “compassion” in allowing motions of condolence to be recorded without objection. The EFF hit back a little later by referring to the DA as “this racist party”, and a tone of acrimony between the two parties was thus established early on.

If there seemed to be a faint whiff of déjà vu to Tuesday’s debate in the National Assembly, that’s because we had quite literally seen some of it before. In late June, a special debate was held in the House about the ANC’s failure to detain Bashir in South Africa. On Tuesday, some very similar terrain was covered by politicians on all sides.

The DA’s Mmusi Maimane dwelt on the atrocities allegedly committed by Bashir in Sudan. He referred to Zuma, as he has before, as a “broken man”, but this time introduced a number of other “broken men”: genocidal dictators like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung.

For those who might feel that was taking things a step too far, however, Maimane was also careful to clarify the terms of the discussion. The issue was not about whether we thought the International Criminal Court (ICC) was within its rights to police African leaders like Bashir, Maimane said. “Today we debate our Constitution.”

The DA’s James Selfe took much the same route: “This House is not being asked whether we like President Zuma or we don’t like him. We are not being asked whether or not we think he has done a good or bad job as president … We are being asked whether or not President Zuma committed a serious violation of the Constitution or the law. That is a determination on the facts.”

The reason the DA is laying the blame for Bashir’s escape from South Africa directly at Zuma’s feet is because of the evidence that Zuma’s Cabinet discussed whether or not to arrest Bashir. As Selfe noted in the National Assembly, this information was confirmed by an affidavit submitted by director-general of the Presidency Cassius Lubisi.

Deputy Justice Minister John Jeffery pointed out in a scathing response, however, that Zuma is not even named in the ongoing court processes around the matter.

The EFF agreed with the DA that Zuma should go, as an “electoral disaster”, to quote MP Godrich Gardee. But the EFF is contemptuous of the ICC and rejects the idea that South Africa should have arrested Bashir while he was on South African soil. “Those who want Bashir can take the next flight to Khartoum or Darfur,” said Gardee, calling such an arrest tantamount to a declaration of war.

Gardee said that instead Zuma should be impeached for his 783 corruption charges; the over-spending on Nkandla; the Marikana massacre; the slow pace of economic growth; disrespect for democratic institutions and more.

The United Democratic Movement’s (UDM’s) Nqabayomzi Kwankwa indicated that the UDM could also not support the DA’s impeachment motion due to its focus. Kwankwa said the UDM would have been in favour, had the motion been about anything other than Bashir. The arrest of Bashir would have scuppered peace efforts in Sudan and alienated South Africa from the content, he said. “In trade terms, without Africa we are completely insignificant.”

A number of heavyweights from the ANC were dispatched to the podium to rebuke the opposition in similar terms. Small Business Minister Lindiwe Zulu accused the DA MPs of never having set foot in any other African countries, and hence being oblivious to the need for good intra-continental relations. Neither did DA MPs know what it was like to “duck blows and bullets” in trying to help resolve African conflicts, Zulu said.

Jeffery quoted former president Thabo Mbeki as opining that Bashir was a “critical component” of the ongoing peace-making process in Sudan, and to remove him would thus be reckless. Jeffery said the issues at hand were complex legal ones still being considered by the court.

No ANC figure attempted a defence of Zuma with reference to his actual leadership record – unless you count MP Jackson Mthembu’s remark that Zuma was leading the country “with distinction”. Instead, the opposition came in for a rhetorical pounding. Mthembu compared the EFF to Nazis, and suggested that both Helen Suzman and Tony Leon would be ashamed of the current-day DA.

Jeffery, in an obvious riposte to Maimane’s ‘broken man’ narrative, referred to the leader of the opposition as a “hollow man presiding over a hollow party”.

When the time to vote came, the EFF chose to abstain. Without the EFF’s support, or that of the UDM, the DA’s cause was lost. In total, those in favour of a committee to investigate impeaching Zuma scraped together 100 votes. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, an attempt to topple the president via parliamentary processes came to absolutely nothing. DM

Photo: South African President Jacob Zuma at the Presidential home in Pretoria, South Africa a week after the ruling ANC won 62% of the local election vote. May 26, 2011. Photo Greg Marinovich / Storytaxi.com

Read more:

• Parliament Diary: ANC gets a bashing over Bashir, on Daily Maverick