Speaker Mbete’s proposal ‘absurd’

THE latest action by the Speaker of Parliament, Baleka Mbete, to file an affidavit in support of the Reserve Bank’s application to set aside the proposed remedial action of the public protector, to amend the constitution to change the mandate of the Reserve Bank, is yet another sign that the wheels of the autocratic Zuma regime are slowly but surely coming off.

After the sterling work done by former public protector Thuli Madonsela, Busisiwe Mkhwebane is displaying that either her grasp of constitutional principles is rather limited, or that she may be taking her instructions from those who are taking the nation for fools, the orchestrators of state capture.

Even the man in the street knows her proposed remedial action borders on the absurd, and yet she, a trained advocate, went ahead anyway.

And now, with David Mabuza breaking ranks in the so-called Premier League, a constituency that would have been strategically invaluable to Zuma in his plans to anoint his preferred successor, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, and the rank and file ANC member clearly going to reject Zuma’s undemocratic, ill-conceived and naively transparent proposal for the person who scores the second most votes in the presidency race in the December elective conference to become the deputy president, the tide is inexorably turning against the man who has set the country on the path to ruin.

Zuma is facing the stark reality that as the sands of time towards the elective conference are running out, in the court of public opinion he is a dead man walking. For when his term as ANC president ends in December, his grip on power will be over. But the biggest tragedy is that he set the trajectory of the decline of the ANC, and that all true democrats know it will be a new struggle to regain the trust of the people again.

GEORGE HECTOR Heathfield