Witch-hunters on TV should hang their heads in shame

EXTREME surprise is characterised by the fact that some deeds prime one to be so shocked that the only force needed to render us comatose or unconscious is to be hit over the head by somebody wielding a canary feather.

I could have been knocked down by a canary feather watching a recent television show posting pictures of ANC members suspected of having voted for the removal of President Zuma.

A presenter with a panel advocated this witch-hunt, it seemed. This to me was a disgusting example of journalism. It was worse than the efforts of Joseph McCarthy, J Edgar Hoover and the present sleuth in America combined. Talk about insensitivity and an ignorance of how a democracy is supposed to function! The background to the above is as follows:

The call for a secret ballot in the no-confidence motion against Zuma caused quite a stir, yet the Constitutional Court ruled that there was nothing preventing the Speaker from ordering a secret ballot.

The reason for wanting a secret ballot was obvious: members of Parliament who agreed with a widespread conviction that the president acted in ways very damaging to the welfare of South Africans simply feared reprisals.

This was confirmed through recent calls, by no less than the president, that those members of the ANC should be disciplined – illustrating that their fear was quite rational and well-founded. It was also reinforced by the arbitrary dismissal of senior MPs and notorious because of a very strong correlation between these acts and South Africa’s unprecedented financial woes.

On the day of the vote of no confidence in the president, all the leaders of the opposition parties, without exception, made passionate pleas to the parliamentarians present in the chamber to vote for the motion to have a probably corrupt president removed from office. Outside of Parliament, huge and spontaneous public rallies passionately supported the call for the removal of the president.

Members of the ruling ANC party countered with speeches emphasising that such a vote cast by party mem- bers would be against party policy and would perforce be “unconstitutional” because, the argument went, the ANC has been elected by a majority of South Africans to govern and that nobody had the right to call for Zuma’s dismissal.

This, of course, is drivel: the electorate certainly had no intention to vote for, indeed could hardly have foreseen, that the president would turn out to be a one-man wrecking ball.

A respected ex-minister of finance, for instance, calculated that losses to the fiscus amounted to R100 billion – due to widespread corruption and strange appointments by the president as well as strange associations of the president with an Indian family.

So who was right; those who recognised a danger to the welfare of South Africa or those who argued party loyalty, negating the facts?

It is the democratic right of ANC members who knew the truth to have taken remedial action. The owners, director, presenter of the said television channel as well as the panel members who publicly assassinated the characters of ANC “suspects” should hang their heads in shame. To go for a witchhunt in the face of a Concourt ruling trying to protect dissenters from victimisation tells me the hunters are vindictive egotists with no regard for the constitution, for freedom of association or for freedom of speech. Ben Smit Melkbosstrand