Cape Town - All the signs are that the issue of Masizole Mnqasela’s membership of the DA, which will determine his future as speaker of the Western Cape legislature, may be headed to court.
This after Mnqasela, who had been given a deadline of 10am yesterday to reapply for his membership of the party after DA Federal Council chairperson Helen Zille announced its cessation, directed all queries about the matter to his lawyers.
Asked about his fate, Mnqasela said: “These are matters that are now more legal in nature than political. I have asked the attorneys to handle the matter for now. Talk to my attorney Frank Raymond and he will tell you what they are doing.”
However, when contacted for comment on whether the matter would now be proceeding to the courts, Raymond said: “I can’t give you any comment right now, it is a sensitive matter. There is a process going forward but I can’t comment right now.”
DA spokesperson Richard Newton would only say: “We have received correspondence from Mr Mnqasela and it is currently being dealt with at the appropriate level. We will respond officially in due course.”
DA Federal Council chairperson Helen Zille had not responded to queries from the Cape Argus by the time of writing.
Ahead of the 10am Tuesday deadline that the DA had set on Monday for Mnqasela to reapply for his membership of the party, Zille told the SABC’s SAFM that Mnqasela had “unreasonably disparaged” the DA and its disciplinary processes by referring, among other things, to a witch-hunt against him in July this year.
“But he did stop disparaging for a long time until this last weekend when he held a press briefing where he repeated his statements on a political witch-hunt and agenda which was immediately in violation of the constitution,” she said.
She said it was these statements that led to the cessation.
Zille objected to the media saying Mnqasela’s membership had been terminated: “We have not terminated his membership; it was a cessation of his membership.”
For the sake of clarity, the Cape Argus consulted a thesaurus and found that termination was a synonym for cessation.
Mnqasela had been suspended from all party activities in May following allegations of fraud and corruption, relating to subsistence, travel and entertainment allowance claims he had made.
He said it was during his disciplinary hearing last Friday that he was informed about a motion of no confidence against him by his own party.
Meanwhile, leader of the opposition Cameron Dugmore (ANC), who is an alternate member of the legislature’s Programming Authority, which sat in the morning, said information he had was that Mnqasela’s lawyers had sent a letter of demand to the DA for them to withdraw the “cessation” of his membership by noon yesterday.
“Failing which, they will launch an application to set aside the decision by (the DA’s) FedEx (federal executive). Confusion reigns, only the court will bring clarity now, it seems,” he said.
With regard to the no-confidence motion against Mnqasela, programming authority chairperson Deidré Baartman (DA) said: “The committee has not yet scheduled the matter of the motion of removal.”
At the same time, however, committee member and ANC deputy chief whip Khalid Sayed said the motion had been kept on the order paper but without a date for action on the chance that Mnqasela’s membership of the DA was reinstated.
Sayed said he had argued in the meeting that as long as he was not a member of the party technically, Mnqasela was no longer a member of the legislature and if that was the case, then there was no point keeping a motion that sought to remove him.
Good party MPL Shaun August, himself a former member of the DA, said the latest developments in the saga had once again exposed that there were two sets of rules - seemingly based on race - used by the DA in matters related to the disciplining leadership.
August said: “Considering that both Mnqasela and deputy speaker Beverley Schäfer appeared before the Conduct Committee in relation to alleged misconduct on their parts, the DA remains hell-bent on ousting the one, while the other remains protected.”
Freedom Front Plus MPL Peter Marais said: “This has now become an internal party matter and not a decision for the legislature to get involved in.”
Mnqasela fell out with the DA following the party’s Federal Legal Commission (FLC) recommending that he be charged with misconduct.
This came after an investigation stemming from protected disclosures by whistle-blowers alleging fraud and corruption relating to subsistence, travel and entertainment allowance claims by him.