Africa-Press – South-Africa. Johannesburg – The former chairperson of Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa), Themba Godi, has accused ANC MPs of having played a key role in the weakening of Parliament and its inability to hold the executive to account.
Taking the stand at the Zondo commission on Monday, Godi testified on how ministers and accounting officers in departments and state-owned entities refused to implement corrective action recommended by his committee to remedy financial mismanagement and to ensure consequence management.
Godi, who had led Scopa for 13 years, said ANC MPs had been “useful idiots” who chose to form a line of defence for ministers instead of holding them to account as was expected of Parliament.
He said oversight was generally marred by politics as MPs came to various committees armed with a political mandate from their respective parties, with reason and facts doing little to change the stances they were mandated to adopt by parties.
“Many of our comrades in the portfolio committees were very pliable and acted like useful idiots of the executive, if I can use that word, in terms of not playing oversight but having instances where they would actually defend officials instead of assisting oversight… whatever the political dynamics were, but there were a lot of our colleagues who were actually an embarrassment to the notion of public representation,” he said.
Godi said ANC MPs who were speaking with him in corridors indicated that being outspoken and taking a hard line against the executive negatively impacted political careers, adding that many Scopa members of the governing party were not returning to Parliament after elections.
“We would talk in the corridors that the stand that they were taking was going to have negative consequences for the political careers and those that I had in the fifth Parliament, not even one of them had gone back to Parliament. Tell me that it is mere coincidence,” he said.
Godi said Scopa had focused on departments and entities with the largest budgets and where financial mismanagement was also rampant, especially through supply chain deviations.
“This is another form of non-compliance where, to circumvent going through the tendering process, departments would always do deviations or expansions from normal processes. This has become the favourite route through which departments avoid compliance,” he said.
He said deviations and expansions were “frighteningly high in amounts” and that the process was given a veneer of legality by the National Treasury as it had the powers to give a green light on it.
Godi said Parliament had over the years failed to track and monitor compliance by the executive with proposed corrective action, and that the legislature had also failed during the same period to adopt any mechanism aimed at compelling ministers to implement directives from MPs.
He said Scopa had gone through more than 200 reports annually coming from audits of departments and SOEs, with many of them showing poor financial controls and malfeasance which hardly improved despite recommended directives to correct wrongs.
DA chief whip Natasha Mazzone, who has been member of the portfolio committee on public enterprises, told the commission that the ANC in Parliament had for years defended the irregular subsidisation of the Gupta media empire despite calls by the DA for a full probe on allegations that the controversial family was milking the state with the help of ministers and officials.
Political Bureau
