Africa-Press – South-Africa. Despite a committee overseeing the Presidency currently being considered by the National Assembly Rules Committee, the ATM has written to Speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula demanding the establishment of such a committee.
The absence of a committee overseeing the Presidency has long been a bugbear of opposition parties. The executive-minded ANC has blocked their calls for the establishment of such a committee, but last year, a motion by IFP chief whip Narend Singh provided a breakthrough.
His proposal has been before a subcommittee, which deliberated on the proposal and reported back to the committee on Wednesday.
The subcommittee emphasised “the need for Parliament to conduct oversight and hold the executive to account and provide comprehensive mechanisms for this purpose; and noted that the budget of the Presidency was currently scrutinised by various structures but that the Parliamentary Budget Office [PBO] would be requested to analyse the details of the vote to identify possible gaps that may exist so as to inform further deliberations on the matter”.
The subcommittee’s report was adopted by the committee.
Despite opposition parties’ pressure for the establishment of the committee, the ANC contingent on the subcommittee decided to kick the can down the road, arguing that further research needed to be done.
This was also discussed by the Rules Committee when it dealt with Parliament’s implementation plan for the Zondo Commission report. The ATM did not participate in this meeting.
On Wednesday, ATM leader Vuyolwethu Zungula wrote to Mapisa-Nqakula.
“The budget in the Presidency has now expanded beyond private office operations like remuneration of office bearers and staff. The President himself has now become an executive authority of units that are spending millions every year but no accountability to Parliament,” he wrote.
“It is against this background that the ATM is requesting the Speaker to set up a portfolio committee that will specifically exercise oversight over all the units and activities that do not find expression in the current portfolios and thus are falling through the cracks in terms of being held accountable for spending millions of taxpayer’s monies.
“This request is in keeping with the mission statement of Parliament, ‘To represent the people, and to ensure government by the people in fulfilling our constitutional functions of passing laws and overseeing executive action’.”
Zungula added that, in his State of the Nation Address last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa had committed to implementing the Zondo Commission’s recommendations, which included a committee overseeing the Presidency.
“This new committee could also receive reports of the billions of dollars that in most cases we hear about in the media, where the president is reported to have mobilised funds and grants. The Director-General in the Presidency should be regularly accounting to Parliament, like all other DGs, for all monies spent and received in the name of the President and Deputy President,” he wrote.
“The ATM is requesting an urgent response so that there is sufficient time to put this request into effect into the 2023/24 financial year [calendar].
“In the meantime, the ATM is requesting the Speaker to call the President and DG to account within this financial year for all the activities that have not found expression in the various Executive Authority Portfolios.”
In his letter, Zungula didn’t refer to the work currently being done by the Rules Committee on the committee.
One of the reasons the ANC previously advanced against the establishment of a committee – also by Ramaphosa and ANC chairperson Gwede Mantashe when they testified before the Zondo Commission – is that all executive functions are delegated to ministers, who are overseen by portfolio committees.
The commission did not buy what they were selling.
It said: “It is not correct that everything for which the president is responsible [is delegated] to a minister or department outside the Presidency. Our recent history also shows that the president’s conduct is not always subjected to adequate oversight by the existing portfolio committee.
“A process to enable the president and Presidency’s conduct to be subjected to more probing scrutiny than is feasible in a plenary session of the National Assembly would therefore appear to be beneficial,” reads the Zondo report.
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