The Democratic Alliance’s (DA's) motion to set up a committee to consider impeaching President Jacob Zuma was voted down in the National Assembly on Tuesday as opposition failed to united behind it.

Five and half months after a DA vote of no confidence in the president met the same fate, it was voted down by 211 to 100 votes, with 17 abstentions.

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and United Democratic Movement (UDM) said they would whole-heartedly support the impeachment of the president but could not agree with the reason advanced by DA leader Mmusi Maimane who said it was a matter of fact that Zuma failed to uphold the law and the Constitution when the government chose not to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on South African soil in June.

“The president and his Cabinet deliberately resolved to break the law. The president decided that the law did not apply to him and his Cabinet,” Maimane argued.

The EFF’s Godrich Gardee said his party wanted Zuma to be removed from office for a host of reasons, ranging from over-spending on his Nkandla home to the Marikana shooting of mine workers, but the DA had not chosen one they could support.

The UDM’s Nqabayomzi Nkwanka echoed the sentiment: “If this motion had been brought to Parliament for any other reason than President al-Bashir we would have supported this motion.”

He added that arresting a sitting president would have been “foolhardy” and led to a declaration of war by Sudan. Furthermore, it would have alienated South Africa from the rest of the continent and implied that the African Union was not a legitimate body as it could not, like other regional organisations, decide to grant immunity from prosecution to a head of state attending a summit.

The Inkatha Freedom Party and the Freedom Front Plus backed the motion. The DA had lobbied the EFF for support without success and members privately acknowledged before the debate that the motion was doomed because it lacked the necessary numbers without the far-left’s backing.

Al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges relating to the conflict in Darfur, was allowed to leave the country in violation of a Pretoria High Court order. In a subsequent ruling by a full bench, the same court said it was of concern that the government had defied the order, with Judge President Dunstan Mlambo adding that government’s conduct in failing to arrest al-Bashir was inconsistent with the South African Constitution.

The DA based its motion on the argument that Zuma, as head of the executive, carried the responsibility for this.

But Deputy Justice Minister John Jeffery reiterated in his speech that the judgment did not mention Zuma by name and that the government was appealing it, before launching into a personal attack on Maimane, as other ANC speakers had.

He quoted a controversial Business Day column by disgruntled former DA employee Gareth van Onselen, which branded Maimane a “hollow man” and inexperienced politician ill-equiped for the task of leading the opposition.

And like former ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu, he poked fun at the short-lived nature of the parliamentary co-operation between the DA and the EFF last year, by saying Maimane brought a spurious motion because he was borrowing to match the theatrics of Julius Malema’s party.