On Friday, 16 August, Justice and Constitutional Development Minister Thembi Simelane was accompanied by Deputy Minister Andries Nel. (Photo: Supplied) 
The scheduled Q&A session for Government of National Unity (GNU) ministers from the Peace and Security Cluster in the National Assembly on Wednesday could not have come at a worse time for Justice Minister Thembi Simelane.
Simelane was one of the members of the executive required to appear before MPs, just two days after a joint Daily Maverick and News24 investigation revealed that the minister may have participated in the looting of VBS bank by accepting a dodgy loan from a company that brokered unlawful investments into VBS while she was the mayor of Polokwane in 2016.
The justice minister must be feeling the heat following President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Wednesday morning statement that he had ordered a “detailed report” on the matter.
Initially, it appeared that Simelane might try to dodge engagement with MPs on Wednesday afternoon altogether by delegating the responsibility to answer the first questions to her deputy, Andries Nel — who was almost immediately drawn into the saga by the DA’s justice spokesperson, Glynnis Breytenbach.
How, asked Breytenbach, did the National Prosecuting Authority intend to proceed with investigating the Simelane VBS allegations, given the “glaring conflict of interest” posed by having the justice minister “as a suspect”?
Answering on Simelane’s behalf, Nel said that she “intends to give her absolute and full cooperation to all law enforcement agencies”.
Nel did not entertain a subsequent question from ActionSA MP Athol Trollip as to whether having a justice minister with a “cloud of corruption” hanging over her head would undermine graft-busting efforts, nor the accompanying suggestion that it might be prudent for Simelane to step aside.
Simelane herself subsequently stepped up to answer other justice-related questions, but restricted her comment on the VBS matter to an initial oblique statement: “Permit me to start by making a commitment to this House on my availability on my response, if any is needed, by the House, committee or Public Protector on [the] issue doing the rounds.”
House Chair Cedric Frolick, an ANC MP, shut down an attempt from the EFF to question Simelane further about VBS.
State Capturers’ revenge arc in full swing
Deputy Justice Minister Nel told the National Assembly about the ongoing prosecutorial efforts to ensure that we “never, never and ever again revisit the tragic chapter of State Capture in our public life”.
Unfortunately, that ship had already sailed — with State Capture being revisited rather viscerally by the swearing-in to Parliament, some hours earlier, of the MK party’s latest round of MPs.
Among them were former Eskom CEO Brian Molefe, former Transnet CEO Siyabonga Gama and former Prasa CEO Lucky Montana, all abundantly name-checked by the Zondo Commission — or, as newly returned EFF MP Nazier Paulsen insisted on calling it on Wednesday, the “Zondo gossip commission”.
The MK party has yet to field a full team of 58 MPs to Parliament at any given time, and had a relatively subdued showing at Wednesday’s ministerial question session.
But the party showed its intention of stamping its presence on events at Tuesday’s plenary session, where straight out of the gates its caucus expressed “disgust” that the minister of land reform was not present in order to facilitate an (unscheduled) discussion about land expropriation: “The land must be returned to the people of South Africa.”
MK, as Frolick confirmed on Tuesday, is now the official opposition in Parliament — and its particular preoccupations are already coming into focus.
MP Visvin Reddy, emerging as a particularly audible voice within the caucus, proposed on Tuesday that the House debate the continued use of the term ‘Government of National Unity’: MK maintains that it is misleading, because what is really at play is a coalition between the DA and the ANC.
The party also demanded a comparison of the “state of unemployment under president Zuma where job creation was a priority”, and that of the current administration.
Crime concerns take centre stage
Other parties are similarly staking out their territory in these initial sittings of the seventh Parliament and playing to the public gallery.
The Patriotic Alliance (PA) has already called for a debate on the “influx” of undocumented foreign nationals, while PA MP Stacey-Lee Khojane on Tuesday asked the House to recognise “the establishment of the Joshlin Smith Foundation by the president of the Patriotic Alliance, Mr Gayton McKenzie, to assist in the ongoing search for our green-eyed child Joshlin”.
As Daily Maverick reported last week, there is in fact no evidence that this foundation has been registered.
Concerns about crime took centre stage on Wednesday with the grilling of Police Minister Senzo Mchunu in particular, who was put through his paces about everything from gender-based violence rates to missing police dockets — and did not seem to allay the concerns of MPs about South Africa’s rape statistics in particular.
African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) MP Wayne Thring announced his party’s analysis on sexual violence to the National Assembly: “Porn is the theory and rape is the practice.” Thring called for a total ban on pornography.
Mchunu had a moment to recover when Dirco Minister Ronald Lamola stepped into the hot seat and was grilled by the DA about how his department intended to handle the possible arrival of Russian President Vladimir Putin to next year’s G20 Summit, which South Africa is hosting.
“Russia is part of the G20, they will be invited,” replied Lamola.
Only a fraction of the questions set down on the order paper for Wednesday afternoon were completed before time was up, meaning the remainder will be relegated to written ministerial replies.
There was one last order of business to deal with: House Chair Zandile Majozi, from the IFP, ruled that in a previous session, EFF MP Mbuyiseni Ndlozi had been unparliamentary in suggesting that President Cyril Ramaphosa was suffering from “a form of psychosis or mental illness”.
Asked to retrospectively withdraw his remarks, Ndlozi refused — and was consequently immediately removed from the virtual platform. The session was over anyway. DM