“We must start breaking the perception that parliament protects a government that is profligate and that wastes money and that even allows for the theft of money. We’ve got to start calling swimming pools swimming pools and not calling them fire pools and having the whole of parliament defending the indefensible.”
ActionSA parliamentary leader Athol Trollip’s words on SAfm this week will have rung true for many a South African. For too long, the oversight function of parliament has languished in the shadow of single-party dominance. It’s allowed inept governance to go unchallenged, wasteful expenditure to go unchecked, and meaningful public participation to fall by the wayside. It allowed state capture to flourish.
Now, if the government of national unity offers South Africa’s executive a refresh in governance, what does it mean for parliamentary responsibility?
This isn’t about the plenary — a venue that Trollip said is for brinkmanship and showmanship; a place where people “want to make speeches and cause a palaver”. It’s about the parliamentary committees — the very cornerstone of democracy.
It is here that the real work of parliament takes place: summoning the executive to account, scrutinising budgets, annual reports, and the performance of government departments and state entities. The committees are also a central cog in the legislative process, facilitating public participation and amending bills as needed.
Only, the committee system in parliament has shown itself to be weak. The committees look very busy — but most see oversight as a box-ticking exercise. It’s no surprise, really, given the dominance of the ANC in the committees and its monopoly on committee chair positions. Backbench MPs beholden to the party for their parliamentary perks are for the most part unlikely to rock the boat by taking their senior leaders to task.
It’s disappointing that a party that won just 40% of the vote against the DA’s 21% has claimed more than 75% of the portfolio chairs
Which is why the election of committee chairs this week was such an important step for accountability. There are fronts where things look good: the three house chairs are split between the ANC, DA and IFP. And in the standing committees, Rise Mzansi’s Songezo Zibi (public accounts), Build One South Africa’s Mmusi Maimane (appropriations) and the Freedom Front Plus’s Wouter Wessels (auditor-general) are likely to be no push-overs.
At portfolio committee level, the good news is that the ANC no longer monopolises all the committee chairs — and the loss of its majority means it won’t dominate them in the same way. But it’s disappointing that a party that won just 40% of the vote against the DA’s 21% has claimed more than 75% of the portfolio chairs.
The system could have done with more of a refresh to keep the executive on its toes; if more committee chairs had come from different parties than the responsible minister, scrutiny of the executive would have been more thorough.
Consider the police portfolio, where DA anticrime activist and Bheki Cele nemesis Ian Cameron will head the portfolio committee under ANC minister Senzo Mchunu. Cameron has been vocal about the ministry’s failures over the years, and is well acquainted with the issues bedevilling the police service. He’s unlikely to cut the minister or the police top brass any slack in his new position, and could drive debates in the direction of reform. Now imagine that in more than the handful of portfolios the DA received …
Of course, there’s another hole in the matrix of accountability: the presidency. Since he was first elected, President Cyril Ramaphosa has centralised crucial state functions — the intelligence services, for example — in his office. With no portfolio committee to oversee that institution, there’s no scrutiny of the presidency’s programme of action. The people, in other words, have no sight of a critical elected institution. And that’s unlikely to change under the new government, given that no presidency committee was among the 30 set up last week.
As the seventh parliament begins its term, it’s worth remembering former chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s 2017 words: “Accountability is necessitated by the reality that constitutional office bearers occupy their positions of authority on behalf of and for the common good of all the people. It is the people who put them there, directly or indirectly, and they, therefore, have to account for the way they serve them.”
We can only hope they will.
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