Nobody should have been surprised when President Thabo Mbeki interfered with due process of law by suspending the national director of public prosecutions, Vusi Pikoli, in September, in an attempt to shield the national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, from arrest and prosecution. This was the same Mbeki who torpedoed the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in 2001 when it tried to investigate the arms deal of which he was the major sponsor. Mbeki also interfered with the joint investigation into the arms deal by the auditor-general, the national director of public prosecutions, and the public protector.

This behaviour undermines the administration of justice, or institutions set up under the constitution, or both. It is therefore much more reprehensible in a head of state than Mbeki’s failures over HIV/AIDS and Zimbabwe. Suspending Pikoli is the last straw. The opposition can now hardly avoid proposing a vote of no-confidence in Mbeki and his cabinet when Parliament reconvenes next month.

Carried by a simple majority, such a motion would automatically bring down the government. Neither the Democratic Alliance nor any other opposition party would necessarily wish such a motion to succeed, since one consequence could be the assumption of power by someone facing a possible criminal trial. That is a risk worth running in order to enable the opposition to make the point – dramatically - that presidents who seek to put themselves above the law are unfit to remain in office.

A motion of no-confidence would of course put the African National Congress (ANC) on the spot. Opposition speeches sprinkled with references to the many things ANC members hold against Mbeki could have ANC MPs shifting uneasily in their benches. But they could hardly give the opposition the satisfaction of precipitating the fall of the government. So the ANC would have to swallow hard and keep the unwanted Mbeki in office. Given the colossal defeat delivered to Mbeki and a whole bunch of his cabinet by the ANC’s big conference in Polokwane last month, the party would look not only hypocritical but also ridiculous in voting to retain him in office.

In ousting Mbeki from the party leadership, the Polokwane conference has been hailed as democracy in action. Perhaps. But the demands coming out of ANC headquarters at Luthuli House are ominous. So are some of the responses from the executive and legislative branches of government.

The ANC has thus demanded that the Scorpions be disbanded, and the director-general of justice and constitutional development says they will be. Quite apart from the dubious merits of the case, what is objectionable here is that the party dictates and a senior civil servant obliges. So, evidently, will Parliament, for Baleka Mbete, currently both ANC chairperson and Speaker of the National Assembly, has confirmed that the ANC’s June deadline for disbanding the Scorpions is ‘do-able’ by Parliament.

Mathews Phosa, treasurer-general of the ANC, wrote in the Financial Mail that ‘the president and his cabinet account to the NEC [national executive committee] of the ANC, as any other structure of government does.’ Said another NEC member, quoted anonymously in Business Day, ‘All our cadres in government are deployed by the ANC and can be recalled if need be’. Accordingly the ANC is demanding that its deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, be appointed as a deputy president of the country.

What we have here are not ‘two centres of power’ in contest but a determination to ensure that from now on there is only one: Luthuli House. In Phosa’s words, ‘In practice there is only one centre of power and that is the highest-decision making structures of the ANC’. The ANC is clearly determined to turn both Parliament and the cabinet into sub-committees of the ruling party.

Once two arms of government - the legislature and the executive - have been turned into instruments of the ruling party, a campaign to subordinate the third - the ‘untransformed’ judiciary - will certainly follow. What the ANC wants is subversive of the Constitution itself, for that document vests legislative authority in Parliament, subject only to the Constitution. The Constitution also makes the members of the cabinet accountable to Parliament. To make them accountable instead to the majority party is to undermine both our multi-party stem and parliamentary democracy itself. In short, what the ANC has in mind is nothing less than to exhume the Soviet model of government and impose it on our political system.