It is surprising the DA, EFF and all other non-ANC parties weren’t doing flick-flacks on Tuesday. Even though they lost the no-confidence vote, the number of secret MPs who turned on Zuma was unprecedented.

According to the Mail & Guardian:

As few as 31 or as many as 40 “rebel” African National Congress MPs may have voted for the motion of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma during Tuesday’s secret ballot in Parliament, depending on a range of possible scenarios that could have played out during the vote.

The reason we can’t know the exact number, is some ‘opposition’ parties could have voted in favour of Zuma. The Mail & Guardian have outlined three scenarious here, which show variation in numbers of MPs who might have broken ranks.

Here’s the scenario that gives us a max of 40:

Scenario 2: 40 ANC votes against Zuma

In this scenario we factored in the fact that MPs from the National Freedom Party (NFP) and the African Independent Congress (AIC), two minor opposition parties, may not have voted in favour of the motion alongside the larger opposition parties.

The AIC is in an alliance with the ANC in the Ekurhuleni metro in Gauteng while Zuma in 2014 extended somewhat of an olive branch to the NFP by appointing the party’s leader, Zanele kaMagwaza-Msibi, to his Cabinet as the deputy minister of science and technology.

Both factors could possibly have influenced the NFP and the AIC’s decisions for Tuesday’s vote.

The NFP has six MPs and the AIC has three.

If we subtract these nine MPs from the total number of 151 opposition MPs who could possibly have voted for the motion of no confidence, along with the four absent opposition MPs and the PAC MP who indicated he would abstain from the vote, as mentioned in scenario 1, we would be left with a maximum of 137 opposition MPs who could have voted in favour of showing Zuma the door.

This means that 40 ANC MPs would have needed to side with the opposition in order to reach the total of 177 “yes” votes.

Needless to say the ANC have kicked-off a witch hunt to find out who would commit such treason.

As per Times Media:

ANC heavyweights are threatening to hunt those who voted against President Jacob Zuma on Tuesday as the DA pushes for an early election.

Meanwhile, The Times’s sister publication, the Sowetan, has established that ANC MPs in a critical caucus meeting before Tuesday’s no-confidence vote were told that their jobs could be on the line if they voted to support the motion as it could force an early election.

You can read more about that here.

Can you feel that?

The winds of change..

[source: m&g + tlive]