There’s been a vast amount of hand-wringing about last week’s disruption of Parliament by Julius Malema and the EFF. Much of it has come from the ANC, put on the spot by Malema, and some from more liberal quarters like the DA, secretly pleased that someone stuck it to Jacob Zuma, but critical in public over the abuse of Parliament and its procedures.
Malema’s call for Zuma to pay back the Nkandla money has been well-debated elsewhere and there is no need to go over that ground again here. What is important to note is that it’s in the very nature of a Parliament to be disrupted. In fact, protesters and opposition politicians have been targeting such gatherings and using them for their own ends almost since the first Parliament went into session.
We could start with the Senate in Ancient Rome – which was used as the pretext for the assassination of Julius Caesar, in 44BC. The conspirators had resolved to kill Caesar but needed him unguarded and alone, as he would be when the Senate went into session. Or fast forward to 1966, in Cape Town, when Dimitri Tsafendas killed Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Assassination is an extreme example of parliamentary disruption, but it’s a fact.
A more modern – and consistent – example comes from India. There Parliament, or the Lok Sabha, as it’s more properly known, is interrupted so often that during its last session, the 15th since Independence in 1947, it was able to work for no more than 61% of its scheduled time. Even the new session, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has already been brought to a standstill by opposition members protesting against the Budget. Analyst Ronojoy Sen, writing in The Times of India, reminds his readers that India’s parliament has a history in this regard: “…even during Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, when Congress [Party] was dominant, disruptions were not unknown.”
South Korea is another democracy with ‘form’ in this regard. The most cursory scan of Google produces at least four out-and-out brawls – full-on fisticuffs – in their National Assembly as well as a sit-in by opposition MPs at the end of 2008. That last incident was in protest at the potential passage of a Free Trade Agreement with the United States.
Taiwan also has a notably combustible assembly – the Legislative Yuan, as it’s called. In 1995, again according to Google, it “was presented with the Ig Nobel Prize Peace Award for ‘demonstrating that politicians gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by waging war against other nations.’”
Talking of fisticuffs, political violence is not limited to ‘excitable foreigners’, as they might once have been called inside the hallowed portals of Westminster, ‘Mother or Parliaments’. Who will forget Irish Independent Socialist MP and peace campaigner, Bernadette Devlin, punching British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling during a debate on Bloody Sunday? The oleaginous Maudling insisted to the Commons that British troops had only opened fire on protesters in self-defence. Eyewitnesses, including Devlin herself, knew otherwise and she was so enraged by Maudling’s lies that she smacked him in the gob, as they might say in Belfast’s Falls Road. Mind you, she was suspended from Parliament for six months for her pains.
Nor can we pretend that this sort of action is the preserve of the hard left. In 1976, Britain’s Parliament was once more brought to a standstill by Conservative Party ‘Big Beast’ and patrician, Michael Heseltine. He seized the ceremonial Mace, raised it over his head and began threatening a group of Labour Party MPs who had started singing The Red Flag. There was no more business that day either.
Even the United States has a rich history of legislative violence on both Capitol Hill and in various of the states’ assemblies. And a more discreet form of parliamentary disruption takes place quite regularly via the Senate practice called a filibuster. Used to this day, a filibuster involves a Senator speaking endlessly, on and on, until the time set down for the debate runs out. The record is held by the late and then-Democratic Senator, Strom Thurmond, who spoke in 1957 against the Civil Rights Act for 24 hours and 18 minutes. A process known as ‘Cloture’ is used to bring the filibuster to an end, but while it’s underway it’s as disruptive as any regular brawl. Thurmond’s filibuster had no effect – the Civil Rights Act passed anyway.
It’s clear from the far-from-exhaustive list above that disruption, quite often mildly violent, is one of democracy’s fellow-travellers. Indeed, it could even be argued that it’s the mark of a certain kind of robust health, not unlike street protests. Whatever your view, South Africa’s new democratic Parliament finds itself in a place not seen since its establishment in 1994. For the first time in those 20 years, there’s some very different, quite edgy politics on the go, and the scent of danger lingers in the air.
Interesting times!