Cops in Parliament
IT’S certainly a rum thing, the riot police going into Parliament. Who ordered them in? In the days I was down there in the press gallery, the police on the premises reported to the Speaker and nobody else.
That was brought home very forcefully one afternoon when a cop – one of those on the parliamentary staff – suddenly came into the office I shared with some colleagues and very politely asked if I would accompany him to somebody who wanted to interview me.
He took me to an office in the Senate building. There sitting behind a large tape recorder with a bristling moustache was a plainclothes colonel, an absolute caricature of the security policeman, who proceeded to fire at me a string of goonish questions about the gruesome murder of Dr Robert Smit in Springs, a year or so before.
Smit had been the Nat candidate in an election, having recently returned from a stint at the World Bank, in New York. But what was I, a wordsmith from Durban, supposed to know about it? The thing was totally bizarre.
The colonel’s moustache positively quivered as he fixed me with a beady eye, tapped the taperecorder to emphasise that my words were being taken down and asked: “Is there anyone you suspect of murdering Dr Smit?”
I wasn’t quick enough to denounce the Receiver of Revenue and the chairman of the Maize Board. Just then the first cop came in again and started whispering urgently to the colonel. He switched off his tape recorder and I was told the interview was over.
It turned out that a whole lot of my colleagues had been similarly rounded up at random and were being given the same grilling. Word got to the opposition. Colin Eglin rose in the House and asked the Speaker and members if they were aware what was going on?
Jimmy Kruger, Minister of Justice, was gobsmacked. He knew nothing about it. The Speaker was astonished. The special branch spooks were unceremoniously sent packing. The Receiver of Revenue and the chairman of the Maize Board were safe. What the cops’ real mission had been remains a mystery.
Things might have changed today. But back then no copper dared set foot in Parliament unless he was on the staff and accountable to the Speaker. Questions remain.
Confrontation
THE Speaker back in those days was a man named Jannie Loots. He was retiring and diffident in manner and scrupulously impartial, as the Speaker has to be. His two main challenges seemed to be keeping tabs on the wicked spurof-the-moment humour of opposition MP Horace van Rensburg and coping with the volcanic rages of prime minister PW Botha.
On one occasion he ordered PW to withdraw an unparliamentary remark. Botha, livid with rage, tried to argue, the fraught situation not helped by cries from Van Rensburg