Opposition parties expect President Jacob Zuma on Thursday to answer on when he will pay back the money he owes from the building of Nkandla.
The ghost of the disrupted August 21 parliamentary session will finally be put to rest on Thursday when President Jacob Zuma appears in the National Assembly to answer the questions left over when the sitting was cut short last year when chanting Economic Freedom Fighters demanded a time, date and method of payment over his Nkandla homestead.
While the president is expected to appear before Parliament four times a year, opposition parties earlier this year fought and won a battle for an extra date, as they believed the unfinished business from the interrupted session needed to be dealt with for the business of Parliament to continue.
And while the issue, which brought Parliament to a standstill last year, is not on the official question paper for Thursday, it might crop up in the 12 supplementary questions the different parties can pose based on his answers.
When will he pay?
Refusing to be drawn on his party’s expectations for the day, Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) national spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said the question paper was good and well.
“But the EFF has one well-known question pending, of when the president is going to pay back the money, in accordance with the public protector’s findings.”
And that is the only question United Democratic Movement’s leader, Bantu Holomisa, is also interested in.
Holomisa said he did not know why the question of Nkandla was not on the list for Thursday, as he had been in line to ask a supplementary question on the issue last year.
“Why are they leaving the question which was not finished out? Parliament was disrupted when the speaker suspended the proceedings, and she should have now started with that question. There should have been four questions instead of three. At the time, there were three people who had supplementary questions to ask on the issue. Why are they running away from it? They have done away with the real question, and I don’t even think I want to know anything regarding those three questions.
“Last year, I was up to ask the question after [EFF leader Julius] Malema. What rule have they used to disappear it from the questions?”
Supplementary questions
When President Jacob Zuma appears in Parliament on Thursday, the focus will not be on the three questions he has been asked by the different parties, but on the supplementary questions that parties are busy preparing in response to his answers.
In February before the State of the Nation Address, Zuma provided written replies to the three questions, which were due to be asked that day, but opposition parties took up the fight with Parliament’s programming committee, insisting that he appear before Parliament, so they could have a chance to pose supplementary questions as well.
Democratic Alliance’s chief whip John Steenhuisen said the extra question session was a victory for the opposition to get the three remaining questions answered orally, and as long as the president was forthright in answering questions posed to him, his appearance should be fairly routine.
“We will be meeting tomorrow to discuss the follow-ups that we will be putting to the president, which will be based on the questions put on the order paper. His written responses will provide a guide to how we would frame and phrase the questions, but it will also depend on how he answers. If his oral answer is different to the written question that he responded to, then that will open up avenues for us to go down that road.”
No foreseeable disruption
The MP said he did not foresee any hostility towards the president on Thursday.
“Provided he is forthright in his responses, I think he will get the usual response when he comes to answer questions. There is no need to disrupt the session, no need for parliament to get hysterical about the matter. He has already been in the house to answer question this year and he handled it quite well, there were good answers given. I don’t foresee any problems at all,” said Steenhuisen.
The three questions the president is expected to answer are on the the latest developments in finalising the formal recognition of Khoi and San leaders as indigenous leaders in the country, when does he expect to reach a decision regarding the outstanding, but still pending, applications for presidential pardon in terms of the Special Dispensation Process, and to provide reasons why pardons were granted or not, and the last will be on his delegation for the recent inaugural US-Africa Leaders’ Summit, which was held in Washington DC from August 4 to 6 2014.
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