Something that should be of greater concern bubbled to the surface and got as much attention as debris washed ashore by a stream of water.
The stream in question, in this instance, was the news around the sacking of former EFF second-in-command Floyd Shivambu from the hot seat of the MK Party’s secretary-general.
Shivambo is now destined for the backbenches of the august House of Assembly, as it pleases party overlord Jacob Zuma. It could lead to obscurity and a political wilderness. Only time will tell.
The MKP has, over its short lifespan, proved not to be a pillar of exemplary democracy at work. Sadly, it appears to be least concerned about what we are about to raise here.
Dear reader, It’s been a year and a few weeks since South Africa went to the polls in national and provincial elections to put representatives into Parliament to govern our country.
Yet the party of Zuma has seen no need to fill 10 or so of the 58 seats they won in Parliament when they came in behind the ANC and the DA as the third largest party in South Africa.
It was the equivalent of a devastating earthquake on the political landscape, in the process laying to waste the hitherto airtight grip on power the ANC once had. It was a pivotal period in recent history.
Yet, the party that brought SA into a new chapter of the post-1994 era seems as dazed as a dog that chased hard at a car and has no idea what to do next when it catches up with it.
We view it as dishonest, nah, downright criminal and near treasonous for a party to go out there and ask South Africans to vote for it and duly follow that up with a disdainful and flippant disregard for the voice they have been lent by the people who voted them into Parliament.
Ten seats in Parliament are nothing to be scoffed at. In the liberatory April 1994, a party needed approximately 50,000 votes to secure a seat in Parliament.
The metric wouldn’t have changed that much now. Now, take that threshold for a seat in Parliament and multiply it by the 10 seats MKP is playing marbles with, all at the behest of Zuma.
Much as he was the face of MKP going into the elections, the cult of personality that Msholozi has reduced the third-largest party in SA to is not healthy for our nascent democracy.
That Nkandla has to decide on everything that has to be done in minute detail will cost the MKP in the long run.
Its seats in Parliament are used in a power game in which the party plays a game of patronage to maintain its grip on the remote control.
As mentioned earlier, it has been a year now since the inauguration of the MKP in Parliament, yet the party’s most standout contribution in the House was in a sports, education and culture portfolio meeting in which, comically, their MP, musician Penny Penny, asked a nonsensical question.
The MKP has been outperformed by the fourth largest party, the EFF, as an effective opposition.
You can add to the many hindrances by the fact that the voice of its electorate is not fully represented, literally.
Shivambu’s new deployment also shows how little regard Zuma has for Parliament. Why would a man deemed, for his sins, unsuitable for a party position, be sent to Parliament?
