Johannesburg – EFF members sang about President Jacob Zuma and the money spent on Nkandla as they waited for party leader Julius Malema to address them on Friday night.

“u Zuma o thate i mali yethu” (Zuma has taken our money), they sang in Boksburg, on the East Rand, at an event to celebrate women’s month.

The song was a reference to the R246m spent on security upgrades to Zuma’s Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal homestead. Public Protector Thuli Madonsela recommended in her report on Nkandla that Zuma repay that part of the money not spent on security features, like a swimming pool, cattle kraal, and visitors’ centre.

Last Thursday EFF MPs disrupted questions to Zuma in the National Assembly by chanting “pay back the money”.

At Friday’s event about 100 Economic Freedom Fighters members dressed in red berets and overalls sang struggle songs as they waited for Malema, including one paying homage to ANC veteran Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

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Cape Town – A police constable who corruptly smuggled Mandrax and tik to an awaiting- trial prisoner at the Swellendam Magistrate’s Court was jailed for eight years on Friday for corruption.

Constable Grandville Francke, 34, an orderly at the court, was unaware that he had been targeted in an under-cover police operation and that the prisoner in the cell was in fact part of the trap in March last year.

He appeared in the Bellville Specialised Commercial Crime Court before Magistrate Sabrina Sonnenberg, who also declared him unfit to possess a firearm.

According to the charge sheet, Francke handed a parcel containing three Mandrax tablets and three straws filled with tik to the prisoner in the cell and then went to a store in Swellendam where he received his R500 reward.

Francke told the court that he had given the parcel to the prisoner unaware that it contained drugs, and that he was soon afterwards sent to a shop to purchase chocolates for his supervisor.

On the way, a stranger had given him what he first thought was a R100 note but what turned out to be R500, to buy himself something to drink.

Because of the general hostility between the public and the police, he had accepted the money as a gesture of gratitude for his work as a police official, knowing full well that he was forbidden to accept gifts from the public.

When he realised that he had been given R500 and not R100, he could not “go chasing after the stranger to tell him he had given him too much”, Francke told the court.

He was unaware, at the time, that his acceptance of the money made him guilty of corruption, he told the court.

The magistrate disagreed with defence attorney Chantelle Morgan that Francke was entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and therefore an acquittal.

Instead, she ruled that his version was so inherently unlikely as to be rejected as false.

She said Francke, with seven years’ service, was an embarrassment to the police service.

A wholly suspended sentence, or correctional supervision involving a short period of imprisonment and then his release into house arrest, as suggested by the defence, was inappropriate.

Lenient sentences would cause the public to lose respect for the courts, and would encourage people to take the law into their own hands, she said.

She agreed with prosecutor Xolile Jonas that corruption involving police officials called for harsh punishment, as their job was to uphold the law, not breach it.

The message to the Swellendam community had to be that corruption would not be tolerated.

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Johannesburg – EFF leader Julius Malema has called on National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete not to push the party to shut down Parliament.

“One thing Baleka Mbete does not realise is that if all opposition walk out, they will have to collapse the Parliament,” he told party members in Boksburg on the East Rand, during a women’s month event.

“They must not push us to that level because we will go and have elections again.”

He was reacting to Mbete’s threat to suspend Economic Freedom Fighters MPs from Parliament following their heckling of President Jacob Zuma in Parliament on Thursday last week.

EFF MPs disrupted questions to Zuma in the National Assembly by chanting “pay back the money” and then refusing to leave the House when Mbete ordered them out.

Malema said opposition parties on Friday showed unity when they put their differences aside and refused to select a chairperson for the Nkandla ad hoc committee. They first wanted the committee’s mandate reworked to expressly include Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s findings on the R246m spent on security at Zuma’s Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, homestead.

Reasons

Malema said suspension would not silence the party. They would use the time to launch more branches.

“Jacob Zuma must know that the time for laughing in Parliament is over. He must give the right answers or what happened will continue. Suspend us and when we come back, we will start from where we left off,” Malema said.

Mbete has written to each of the 25 EFF MPs individually to give reasons why they should not be barred from the legislature for up to two weeks for disrupting presidential question time.

Malema earlier on Friday threatened to take the matter to court should Mbete not withdraw her plans to suspend his MPs by noon on Sunday.

He blamed the African National Congress for the formation of his party. If the ruling party thought the EFF was a problem, it had created the problem, he said.

Malema said his organisation was making MPs think twice when they had to account to Parliament.

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