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The National Minimum Wage Bill is officially the last bill to be signed off by the National Assembly during the last plenary sitting of the fifth Parliament.
The last sitting was marked by a sombreness as speakers passed on their condolences to the family of ANC chief whip Jackson Mthembu whose daughter committed suicide yesterday evening.
Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula gave an especially poignant message saying that she too knew the pain of losing a child.
She urged all parents to “listen to our children”.
The National Minimum Wage Bill was passed with 245 votes in favour of it, eight against and one abstention.
The EFF was the only party to reject the bill – the party has a standing position of rejecting a minimum wage in favour of a living wage.
The bill has now been referred to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) for concurrence.
The NCOP will rise on March 28.
Today’s sitting brings an end to what has been a tumultuous five year term for MPs.
The arrival of the EFF saw a different kind of debate being brought into the house which began with the “pay back the money campaign” as well as violent scenes when the party was repeatedly physically removed from the House.
Parliament was also reprimanded by the Constitutional Court when it failed to hold former president Jacob Zuma to account over the security upgrades to his Nkandla home.
In a scathing judgement – resulting from a petition to the highest court in the land by opposition parties – the court said that Zuma failed to uphold his oath of office.
In an unprecedented move, Parliament had to postpone the state of the nation address last year as the ANC mulled over ways to get rid of Zuma after Cyril Ramaphosa had succeeded him at the party’s elective conference in December 2017.
Zuma had survived a series of motions of no confidence in the National Assembly, including one which saw a large number of ANC MPs voting in favour of the motion.
Ramaphosa was elected president in the National Assembly after Zuma resigned on Valentine’s Day last year.
Another historic move made by the fifth Parliament was that of beginning the process of amending the Constitution and in particular the Bill of Rights in order to explicitly allow for land to be expropriated without compensation, a cause championed by the EFF.
The work of amending section 25 of the Constitution will now have to be taken up by the sixth Parliament after this year’s May 8 elections.
DA chief whip John Steenhuisen highlighted the highs and lows of the fifth Parliament and ended his speech by lamenting that Parliament was closing its doors as the country was plunged into darkness.
He said he would have preferred that the law makers remain put and exert pressure on the executive until a solution could be reached around the ongoing crisis at Eskom.
In her farewell speech, ANC deputy chief whip Doris Dlakude revisited the conversation of moving Parliament to Gauteng.
She said that government was paying exorbitant amounts of money housing people at the hotels around Parliament and flying in MPs every week to Cape Town, and that Parliament was not big enough to accommodate joint house sittings or public hearings.
Dlakude ended her speech by observing a moment of silence for the 19 members of Parliament who had lost their lives during the fifth Parliament. These included Collins Chabane, Timothy Khoza, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.
The fifth Parliament was made up of 249 ANC MPs, 89 DA MPs and 25 EFF MPs. The remaining seats were split amongst 10 smaller parties.
