Cape Town – National Assembly Speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula is “happy and relieved” that complaints against her regarding the removal of rowdy MPs from the house have been deemed “inadmissible”.
“I am relieved. I am happy, after a grueling and strenuous exercise of the IPU Standing Committee on Human Rights, as they described a complaint of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) against the Speaker, as inadmissible,” Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said Wednesday afternoon.
The IPU Standing Committee on Human Rights protects and defends MPs suffering human rights violations.
The complaint arose after members of the EFF were removed from the Chamber during the South African State of the Nation Address on 9 February 2023.
In Standing Committee hearings, the complainant and respondent made presentations, followed by questions and engagements to establish the facts of the allegations.
Speaker Mapisa-Nqakula said the complaint should have never been submitted to international parliamentary and human rights structures while internal processes had yet to be used to address the allegations about what transpired during the State of the Nation Address.
Speaker Mapisa-Nqakula said the Standing Committee had been thorough by going through all the evidence presented, including six-minute video footage of the incident and deliberating on the evidence, before concluding that the complaint was inadmissible.
The Speaker said allegations that she had called EFF protesters “animals” was an affront to her “value-based upbringing, her struggle for freedom and every part of her being.
“Such an allegation was purely intended to discredit her,” the Speaker said.