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The EFF will go to court if necessary to ensure that the contentious speech made in Parliament by its leader Julius Malema would not be deleted from the parliamentary record.
“Our commander in chief said nothing wrong,” the party’s spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, said today.
“We will go to the rules committee, but freedom of speech can not be determined by a majority party, unless they want to be embarrassed by court.”
Speaker of the National Assembly, Baleka Mbete, has referred her decision – that the EFF leader’s speech should not appear in the Hansard – to the rules committee for the final decision.
During the debate on President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation speech, Malema made several personal comments about the president, referring – among other things – to his sex life.
After Malema delivered his speech, Mbete said it would be removed from the record, but she did not say under what rule she had made the decision.
A number of legal experts believed she did not have the authority to do so and the EFF, which was unhappy with her decision, had lodged its objection with her office.
In response, Mbete defended her decision during Wednesday’s sitting, but said she would leave it to the rules committee to make a decision about the “principle of the matter”.
Since the ANC had the majority in the rules committee, it could easily confirm Mbete’s decision.
Should this happen, the EFF would challenge the speaker in court.
“We can say what we want,” said Ndlozi.
“She is again starting on that tendency of making illegal rulings to protect her party members.”
A parliamentary procedural expert – who did not want to be identified for work reasons – said to Media24 that Mbete had “no right to expunge the speech from the record.
“The Hansard is a verbatim account of what was said during the sittings.
“If she deletes it, the Hansard is no longer a true reflection of what happened.”
The expert said that Mbete should have stopped Malema as soon as he had said something “unparliamentary” and recommend that he withdraw it. Should he refuse to do so, she could ask him to leave the chamber.
According to Freedom Front Plus MP Dr Corné Mulder, who has been in Parliament for 28 years, said that Malema’s attack on the president was personal and thus out of order, but he agreed that Mbete should have called Malema to order immediately.
He added that the question of whether it should now be included in the Hansard was of academic interest. “The speech was delivered. It was broadcast on TV. It has reached the world.”
To Mulder’s knowledge, this was the first time since 1994 that the speaker had ordered something deleted from the Hansard.
He suspected it was part of Mbete’s “revenge” and suggested uncertainty from the ANC about how to handle the EFF.
