Decoding the ANC's semantics

Beauty is reputedly in the eye of the beholder. For politicians, truth is a similarly moveable feast. It’s all in the phrasing.

The arrival of police at the Public Protector’s offices to search for leaked material, following her report implicating the police National Commissioner in the “unlawful and irregular” R500-million lease of new police headquarters, is apparently not much of an issue for some parliamentarians. Seemingly far more troubling is the problem of media sensationalism.

According to African National Congress members of the parliamentary justice portfolio committee it’s a matter of wording. It’s “worrying sensationalism” on the part of the media to describe the materialisation of two counter-intelligence police at the PP’s offices a “raid” instead of a “visit”.

That the actions of the two senior counterintelligence cops were unexpected, unauthorised, and probably illegal was of little interest to the ANC’s John Jeffreys. He was far more exercised to elicit from the PP, Advocate Thuli Madonsela, whether the officers had been polite and whether her description of “traumatised” staff could really be accurate.

A raid “implies an attempt to use force to gain information”, opined Jeffreys. This was clearly not a raid but an “unsolicited visit”. No doubt, if the police had succeeded in seizing the material without a warrant, Jeffreys would choose to describe this as “impromptu borrowing”.

The Democratic Alliance’s Dene Smuts pointed out to the committee that since the PP is accorded the same constitutional protections from executive interference as a law court, the officers’ action is potentially punishable by a R40 000 fine and a prison sentence.

But the ANC’s Patekile Holomisa was, for an advocate, curiously indifferent to constitutional niceties. He endorsed Jeffreys “agreeable concerns” and said he couldn’t understand why the committee had even been convened.

“It was not as if the police came with guns blazing and kicking doors”, argued Holomisa. It was “not necessary” and it “should not be necessary in future” to hold meetings regarding matters that were “under control”.

And ANC MP Sheila Shope-Sithole’s erudite contribution was reported thus by the Sowetan: “When you talk about raids and grills you are thinking of bacon and eggs. Maybe the news … should be in Shangaan so that we don’t have these big words that confuse people.” While senior ANC MP Jonas Sibanyoni was of the view that the Protector’s staff only felt traumatised “because they were still thinking of apartheid, when police instilled fear in people”.

Sibanyoni’s antipathy to the PP’s office is perhaps perfectly understandable. Madonsela’s notoriously pusillanimous predecessor as Protector, Lawrence Mushwana, recommended in 2008 that the Speaker discipline Sibanyoni for accepting “unlawful and irregular” municipal donations.

Parliament has yet to respond to my asking what Sibanyoni’s “disciplining” involved, if indeed it was carried out. It was clearly not enough to disbar him as the ANC’s choice to co-chair the committee developing a code of conduct for judges.

In all, it has been a consummate display of sophistry on the part of the ANC’s rightwing. Unfortunately for the semanticists, as Jeffreys had to concede, it transpires that it was the SA Police themselves who described the incident as a “raid”.

From the ANC side it was left to the isolated committee chair, Luwellyn Landers, to label the event an “outrage”, an infringement of the law, and to assure the Protector that her office had the “full backing and support” of Parliament.

From the debate, however, it is seems that the ANC’s fine words, however carefully weighed, won’t amount to much. Public Works Minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde has already delivered her verdict on the PP’s investigation.

The minister, slammed for ignoring the opinion of two Senior Counsel that the deal with the National Commissioner’s old pal was illegal, sniffed that the PP’s report is “shallow and superficial”. In ANC semantics what this actually means is “piss off, bitch”.