Mr Speaker, during the years of apartheid, when the state was the target of an armed campaign waged by uMkhonto weSizwe, President P W Botha, the supreme Socratic, used to travel to Parliament in a three-car convoy.
Nowadays, one can see a presidential convoy of up to 13 vehicles on the streets of Cape Town. So it is during the opening of Parliament. Security is of North Korean proportions.
Why is this happening in a country that is supposed to be a democracy that is at peace? It seems there is one of two explanations. Either South Africa today faces a massive security threat that doffs everything that has happened in our past, in which case the government has a duty to share knowledge of such a threat with its citizens, or uMkhonto weSizwe was ineffective. But its myth is kept alive today by the ANC in an attempt to try to prove that those of its members who were in exile freed this country rather than tell the truth, which is that the people of this country - those who were inside the country - made apartheid unworkable. Will the ANC tell us which is the case?