Three councillors, a former MP and a Democratic Alliance office worker are set to improve their political fortunes if the DA’s court action against five defectors in Parliament is successful.
On Monday the DA will ask the Cape High Court to declare unlawful and invalid the defection of four of its senior black MPs to the African National Congress and that of Craig Morkel, who formed his own political party.
The court action is aimed at setting aside Speaker Baleka Mbete’s acceptance of the defections, which in turn would create five vacancies that the DA can fill with newly selected candidates — the majority of whom are white and male, according to court documents.
The DA argues in the court papers that the five defectors had failed to reach the statutory 10% threshold required before any defection. When they defected on September 15, the last day of the floor-crossing window, the DA had boosted its parliamentary seats by two to 52. That meant the five only constituted 9,615%, says DA federal council chairperson James Selfe in his affidavit.
While some legal experts said there might be a case as the defection legislation is silent on how exactly the threshold must be measured, the political colour of the court action cannot be ignored.
”The truth is that the five MPs who attempted to cross yesterday [September 15] were direct beneficiaries of the DA’s attempts to increase the diversity of the party’s leadership,” wrote DA leader Tony Leon in last Friday’s SA Today.
Describing one of the five, ex-trade and industry spokesperson Enyinna Nkem-Abonta, as ”eagerly licking the boots of the ANC’s arch-communists, racial nationalists and xenophobes”, Leon also said he had intervened in the electoral college process to raise Richard Ntuli, since 1999 a Democratic Party MP, into a position on the Gauteng party list, which meant he could return as an MP.
Other defectors are Dan Maluleke, one of three DA deputy chairpersons, and Bhekinhlanhla Mnyandu, a KwaZulu-Natal academic, who was one of the six new black MPs the DA appointed after the April 2004 poll. ”Seldom do political leaders admit that they were wrong. But I take full responsibility for my error in giving these individuals a chance. Their places will be filled by more deserving and committed members of our party,” wrote Leon.
The proposed replacements, should the DA court action be successful, include a return to Parliament for Godfried Grobler, who represented the DP in the National Assembly, but was dropped during the electoral college process ahead of the 2004 election. A similar fate befell Mark Steele, the KwaZulu-Natal-based former MP with about 18 months’ experience, and who is now a councillor in Pietermaritzburg.
Penelope Tainton, ”a party official” according to the court papers, is a former councillor, who apparently resigned over the toenadering (reconciliation) with the Inkatha Freedom Party ahead of the 2004 poll and then turned her attention to the party’s administration. Hendrika Hunter, a councillor for 10 years at Ekurhuleni, is also listed in the court documents as a candidate. The former New National Party councillor remained in the alliance even as the NNP tried to re-establish itself outside the DA in 2002.
For Isaac Julies, the court case means he’s an MP-in-waiting for the second time in 18 months.
Parliament has opposed the DA’s application; its legal advice says that the 10% threshold should be calculated as at immediately before the defection period. ”Thus the five members of the Democratic Alliance who joined the African National Congress and formed the Progressive Independent Movement retain their seats in the National Assembly,” the speaker wrote to the DA on September 16.
Following this communication, the DA turned to the courts.