By recent Parliamentary standards, Wednesday’s presidential Q&A wasn’t a particularly long session. As matters slid towards the third hour, however, numbers in the once-full public gallery began to dwindle at a rapid rate. Quite some time before Speaker Baleka Mbete announced that the sitting was dissolved, the gallery was virtually empty.

It was a telling indication that the suggestion of increased public interest in this Parliament may be little more than a chimera. When it became evident that the prospects of heated slanging matches or fisticuffs were fading, the audience cleared out. The inevitable conclusion is that they were not there to hear President Zuma drill down to the details of Operation Phakisa. They were there for chanting and fights with white-shirted police. They were there for the circus – and on this occasion, the circus didn’t really get off the ground.

Indeed, the white-shirted police got into only one fight for the day – albeit a disturbing enough one. Media24 journalist Jan Gerber was pushed to the ground by two men in white shirts and black pants after he took a photograph of them on the Parliamentary precinct before the Q&A session began.

“Rather aggressively they wanted to know who gave me permission to take photos,” Gerber wrote in an account. “They said I wasn’t allowed to take photos of them and had to delete them.”

As it turned out, the so-called “white shirts” weren’t required in the National Assembly after all. There were no attempted walk-outs, and there was no chanting, or refusals to sit down and shut up. After the session, the DA and EFF leaders both attempted to spin events as some form of victory. The truth is, however, that opposition parties were left looking impotent by the president’s verbal muscle-flexing in the National Assembly.

The first indication that Zuma was not in a mood to be trifled with came when the IFP’s Mkhuleko Hlengwa raised the issue of Nkandla, though not in the way planned by the EFF. The IFP is opposed to an attempt to redraw the municipal boundaries around the town of Nkandla, which the party believes is the ANC’s way of trying to wrest control of Nkandla from the IFP in the 2016 local government elections.

Here Zuma did something unfamiliar: he produced a number of pre-emptive quips about Nkandla – which has become a “very famous village”, he said, chuckling – and its reputation of bloated significance. It was a canny move. In one fell swoop, the feared ‘N-word’ lost its charge as the elephant in the room. Look at me, Zuma seemed to be saying. All this talk about Nkandla is so baseless and absurd that I can bring it up freely and laugh about it.

In response to the DA’s Mmusi Maimane’s pre-submitted question about when else the president would appear in Parliament in 2015 to answer questions, Zuma reiterated the three dates the Presidency has already submitted. Never, Zuma said, had he ever refused to come to the National Assembly when compelled to do so.

“Whenever Parliament says I must come on anything, I do come, I have never refused,” Zuma said. “I have not dodged to answer questions in Parliament.”

Referring to the events of 21 August, Zuma put the blame squarely on the EFF MPs present, saying that he had answered their question on Nkandla. They didn’t like it, he said, because “they want the answer they want”.

An attempt by the EFF’s Mbuyiseni Ndlozi to raise a point of order was not tolerated by Zuma, who continued to raise his voice and speak emphatically over Ndlozi for several minutes despite Speaker Mbete’s failed attempts to call both men to order.

When Zuma eventually chose to stop speaking, Mbete rebuked Ndlozi with a reminder that neither President Zuma nor IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi were his “equals”.

The EFF’s Floyd Shivambu countered that all were equal under the Constitution.

“That does not make you equal to the president,” Mbete responded crisply. She also defended the fact that Zuma had apparently ignored her instructions to stop speaking, saying that he was in “full flight” at the time.

Concluding his response, Zuma contemptuously dismissed the idea that he would commit to an extra date to arrive to answer questions on.

“I’m not giving you a date,” he said. “I never give dates.”

What do you do when the president of the Republic shuts you down in this manner? As members of the opposition discovered on several occasions during Wednesday’s session: not much.

The EFF received the same treatment when MP Natasha Louw finally got a chance to put the #PayBackTheMoney question to the president. Here again, Zuma was both scathing and emphatic.

“Never have I ever thought on the date when I will pay back the money,” he said, with the air of a man determined to set things straight for once and for all. “There is no money that I am going to be paying back without a determination by those who are authorized to do so.”

It was up to Police Minister Nathi Nhleko to determine – by the end of the month – whether Zuma was liable for any repayment. Zuma said that until that happened, nobody could even propose how much he should pay back.

Later, he not so subtly undermined the authority of Public Protector Thuli Madonsela, whose office only has the ability to make recommendations.

“Recommendations are recommendations,” he said. “They are not a verdict.”

When Julius Malema suggested that he was stacking the deck of criminal justice institutions with cadres loyal to him to avoid being brought down for corruption, Zuma simply replied: “I have no case against me”.

He used the same technique on UDM stalwart Bantu Holomisa, who went so far as to suggest that Zuma should consider a “sabbatical” due to all his corruption allegations.

Here again, Zuma played the role of a reasonable man being driven to the end of his patience by nonsensical charges put to him. What allegations, he asked Holomisa, and then simply denied that any allegations existed. He presented himself as a man unfairly attracting heat simply by virtue of his position: “I am a politician. I am a leader,” he said, shrugging from the inevitability of it all.

On the persistence of his critics, he said: “My surname is very nice and simple. Zuma. So they like pronouncing it all the time.” His comments were, as always, punctuated by frequent chuckles, and echoed by laughter and applause from the ANC ranks.

The EFF had loudly and publically proclaimed their insistence before the session that Zuma would be made to answer for the payments on Nkandla. His answer – that an investigation was still underway – was essentially the same as the one he gave last August, which caused that session to tip into disarray.

Yet on this occasion, it appeared that the EFF had no Plan B. Perhaps it would have been a different story if the president had refused to answer their question altogether. But instead he forcefully grasped the nettle and took control of the House, even if his response will have satisfied nobody in the opposition ranks. It seemed that the EFF had nothing further up their sleeves. Zuma assumed the role of exasperated headmaster, with opposition MPs reduced to surly schoolkids.

The DA’s Maimane and the EFF’s Malema both nonetheless sought to present the session in a positive light for their parties.

“If the president was going to win today, he would have won had we said to ourselves: ‘Look, we must walk away,’” Maimane told eNCA afterwards.

“We are very happy that Parliament was able to hold the Executive accountable,” was Malema’s take on events.

Many who watched the session will be unconvinced by either. But the tussle over presidential accountability is not quite done for the week. On Thursday morning, the National Assembly’s programming committee will meet. The opposition leaders are determined that during this meeting, an extra date will be agreed upon for the president to return to Parliament to answer the unfinished business from last year.

Considering that Speaker Baleka Mbete stressed repeatedly on Wednesday that they could not dictate dates to the president’s office, this seems an optimistic outcome. If it doesn’t succeed, what recourse do the opposition parties have? Beyond one of the increasingly frequent forays to the courts, the answer seems to be: not much. As Wednesday’s events proved, when Number One feels like digging his heels in, he’s difficult to budge. DM

Photo: President Jacob Zuma responds to questions in the National Assembly at Parliament, Cape Town, Wednesday, 11 March 2015. Picture: Department of Communications (DoC)/SAPA

Read more:

• Zuma frustrated opposition over Nkandla, on News24.