The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development came in for a bruising when it proposed an increase in powers to regional court magistrates to hand out life sentences. This is the issue Parliament’s portfolio committee on justice and constitutional development has been grappling with for the past two weeks. The proposed amendment seeks to streamline the split system in which regional courts need to refer serious criminal convictions to the high court for sentencing.

If Mbulelo Goniwe wants to get his parliamentary salary back, it will not be enough to sue the legislature; he is going to have to take the ANC to court, too. “Members of the National Assembly are members of the National Assembly at the instance of their respective political parties [and] they serve at the pleasure of their parties. The speaker [of the National Assembly] has got nothing to do with it,” Judge James Yekiso told Ntsiki Sandi, Goniwe’s counsel.