ANC faces fresh battle to have new minister sworn in after Mbete rescue
PARLIAMENT staved off a court bid to have National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete removed from office for bias, but now faces another legal challenge over the “illegal” swearing in of Mosebenzi Zwane as MP, days before his appointment as mineral resources minister.
The EFF yesterday said Zwane’s inclusion in the official list of eligible MPs was in contravention of the Electoral Act – and that it would go to court if Mbete did not annul Zwane’s swearing in and President Jacob Zuma did not annul the cabinet appointment.
The bottom line is: if Zwane was not properly sworn in as MP, he could not have been appointed as a cabinet minister. That is because Zuma has already exhausted the possible permissible appointments from outside the ranks of MPs by including Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane and Deputy State Security Minister Ellen Molekane, who are not parliamentarians, in his executive.
Central to the EFF’s argument is the system under the Electoral Act which allows political parties to change their lists of public representatives in Parliament, and the provincial legislatures, a year after elections.
The Electoral Act allows for a window within seven days of the previous year’s election date to fill all vacancies, for up to 25 percent of candidates to be replaced and for the order of the lists to be changed. Then the lists stand; if an MP resigns, the next one in line takes his or her place.
In May, just over 12 months after the May 7, 2014 elections, the ANC made changes to its national list, as did AgangSA and the EFF, which also changed various provincial to national lists.
The new political party public representatives’ lists effective from May 18 were gazetted on May 27, 2015. Zwane’s name was not there.
But last month, the ANC changed its Free State to national public representatives list, which was published on September 10. In it Zwane was pushed up into first place after another MP from that province resigned, creating a vacancy. The date for the changes was September 2.
Zwane was nominated to Parliament on September 2 and sworn in on September 3.
Deputy Speaker Lechesa Tsenoli made a brief comment at the start of the sitting of that day, but Zwane’s name did not subsequently appear in the announcements, tablings and committee reports, the record of Parliament’s work.
On September 22, Zuma announced that Zwane would be his new mineral resources minister.