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The previous motions have all yielded undesired outcomes and the opposition is banking on the secret ballot as a final push to get rid of the president before his final term expires in 2019.ANC has a lot to gain by opting for secret ballot and below is what I propose for the speaker Baleka Mbete who is caught in-between a rock and hard place based on the Sunday Times headline "You don't wish to be me".
She will be the most powerful woman in South Africa this week and the motion happens on the eve of women's day which makes any tough decision she makes either historical or catastrophic for the role women play in shaping the politics of a nation.
If I were her, this is how I would deal with the situation. The constitutional court has already given her the powers to decide. At the same time, she was put in that position of speaker of Parliament by ANC and loyalty also plays a key role. Despite the media noise for President Zuma to go, it is a fact that there is a still a constituency in the republic both in ANC and the public domain that still want the incumbent to see off his term. How do you play a fair game in such a scenario without depriving the other constituency that democratically voted for ANC in 2014?
Make the voting a two way process. The first process would be to ask all MP's through a secret ballot process on how they want the voting process to be conducted. Like Pontius Pilate, her hands will be clean and all the power will be in the hands of the MP's. This will go either head or tail with former being secret ballot and latter being open vote. If its head, it will be an early victory for the opposition with no guarantee the second and final round will yield a similar outcome. This will keep them from filing an urgent court interdict as they have threatened to do. If the first round is tail, the outcome is unlikely to change in the second round and it will be victory for ANC and another blow to the opposition.
They all say a cat has nine lives and this being the 9th motion of no confidence, the number one citizen has the buoyancy of one more life before he is officially replaced as ANC President in a few months time. Let's wait and see but as I wrote more than a year ago, http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/the-opposition-likely-fighting-a-losing-battle-against-zuma-20160403
