Scorpions Bills resume progress through Parliament

The Scorpions Bills—which will eventually shut down the prosecution-led crime-busting Directorate of Special Operations (DSO) and amalgamate it into the police—resumed their progress through Parliament on Monday as the National Council of Provinces select committee on security and constitutional affairs took them up.

According to Wilhelm le Roux, the Democratic Alliance member of the committee, who was one of only three MPs to actually turn up for the hearing on the Bills, it is all a waste of time anyway since it is the job of the committee simply to rubber-stamp what the National Assembly has already approved.

“We all know it’s a done deal and this is a charade,” he said.

The chairperson of the committee, Kgoshi Mathupa Mokoena, was not having any of this. He said that the committee had shown that it was not a tool of the executive by altering various other Bills in its time—including the Child Justice Bill.

“It is not a done deal,” he insisted.

However, he set his face against allowing full-scale public hearings on the Bill, correctly pointing out that the select committee had been party to the public hearings called in all nine provinces by the two committees of the National Assembly who dealt with the Bills.

Mokoena said that he could not say how long the committee would take to consider the Bills. But the programme allows it to meet every day this week.—I-Net Bridge