Press conferences called by Parliament’s presiding officers have a reputation for starting late and ending early as the assembled hacks struggle to come up with probing questions about the launch of the latest PR initiative – most often some new effort to paper over the institution’s yawning credibility gaps with glossy leaflets, empty promises about oversight and expensive trips to the provinces.
During Baleka Mbete’s tenure as speaker of the National Assembly the summons to come before her latest towering hat for an offering of platitudes was a regular feature of the busiest days on the legislative schedule.
So Tuesday morning was a Âjarringly unfamiliar experience for members of the press gallery.
Ranged before Mbete’s replacement, Gwen Mahlangu-ÂNkabinde, were the chairperson of the National Council of Provinces, Mninwa Mahlangu, and an unlikely panel appointed under Mbete to conduct an independent review of the legislature. They included opposition veteran Colin Eglin, ANC grandee Max Sisulu, political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi, former public protector Selby Baqwa and former ANC MP Pregs Govender.
Others on the panel who weren’t present but might have been expected to contribute a critical perspective were chancellor at the University of Stellenbosch Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, the South African Institute of Race Relations’s John Kane-Berman, Idasa’s Judith February and analyst Sipho Seepe.
Hardly a biddable group. They clearly weren’t given much of a budget, but under Govender’s chairpersonship they weren’t going to let that slow them down too much.
Frankly, for anyone who has spent time around the legislature in the past half-decade, the idea that Govender, who gave up her seat in disgust over her party’s handling of the arms deal and HIV/Aids, be invited to dish out criticism on a parliamentary platform is utterly implausible.
And yet there she was, handing over a report embossed with Parliament’s logo that sums up, between official covers, the deep structural problems that the institution’s lÂeadership and the ANC have been trying to gloss over for years.
At the heart of the panel’s recommendations are concerns about accountability and integrity, as well as the administrative underpinnings of an effective law-making and oversight body.
The report sketches the broad parameters for a programme of Âinstitutional reform that would address the most widely held concerns about what Matshiqi described as the gap between ”the procedural and substantive aspects of democracy”, as well as some crucial finer details that are familiar only to close observers of the legislative scene.
At the heart of the panel’s recommendations is a call for ”urgent” electoral reform to make MPs directly accountable to voters rather than only to party bosses. Echoing the Van Zyl Slabbert report of 2002, it calls for a mixed proportional-representation/constituency model that would, as Sisulu put it, provide the ”best of both”. That approach, of course, is a key plank in the electoral platform of the Congress of the People (Cope) and there are now indications that the ANC, long chary of a change that would reduce the power of its national working committee and the Cabinet to control parliamentary outcomes, may take such ideas on board.
Tougher ethical rules are also mooted for an institution still reeling from the Travelgate scandal and an array of other sleaze allegations. ”Any member of Parliament who is convicted of corruption, fraud, or similar offences should be ineligible to serve,” the report says. It calls for clear post-tenure restrictions on MPs to limit influence-peddling and the establishment of a task team to investigate revision of the conditions under which an MP may cease to be eligible.
Other proposed reforms – such as a mechanism to oversee the ”delegated legislation” or regulations put in place by ministers – have long been on the shopping list of policy-watchers concerned by the way the executive uses regulation to exercise authority through a legislative back door.
Significant would be better controls over how money and time are spent on ”constituency” affairs. Currently, as the report points out in more polite language, constituency offices too often function as party outlets, spending vastly increased amounts of taxpayer cash with very little scrutiny.
The frustrations of MPs, who struggle to get questions answered, who can’t get an up-to-date copy of Hansard and who have grossly inadequate research and administrative support, are much in evidence throughout the report. But it makes less of serious problems in the governance of the parliamentary service, which has seen staff complements and budgets ballooning while outputs, in many cases, have declined.
None of the proposals is new, but the willingness of the presiding officers publicly to entertain such criticism is – as are suggestions from within the ANC that real reform is now a possibility. Of course, as Govender pointed out, elections loom and they could either see the proposals buried or elevated. If we are to believe in Parliament’s frail, post-Polokwane spring, it must be the latter.