Marion Edmunds
THE African National Congress is to decide at its December conference where the seat of Parliament will be located, say government sources.
This could be one of the hottest debates at the national conference, scheduled to take place in Mafikeng, North-West province, just before Christmas.
The ANC is said to be divided on whether to keep Parliament in Cape Town or move it to Gauteng so that it is close to government departments in Pretoria and the country’s largest economic centres. The Cabinet is undecided and even Deputy President Thabo Mbeki is said to be in two minds.
An investigation into the comparative costs of keeping Parliament in Cape Town and moving it to Gauteng has been concluded by the accountants Deloitte & Touche, but the report is yet to be discussed by a Cabinet committee headed by Transport Minister Mac Maharaj. Sources say the study recommends Gauteng as the seat of Parliament. Neither the president’s office nor Parliament’s Speaker, Frene Ginwale, would comment on the report this week.
However, the report is also said to note that most government departments in Pretoria are housed in rented accommodation. This means that the government would not have to sell many buildings in Pretoria or buy new offices in Cape Town, if it chose to move its administration to the coast.
Presidential representative Joel Netshitenzhe said this week that the administrative arm of government would never move to Cape Town, but denied that he had seen the Deloitte & Touche report. He said the report would be released for public discussion after the Cabinet discussed it later this year. He said the Cabinet would contribute to the debate, but the political parties would take the final decision.
Meanwhile the cost of running provincial Parliaments is slowly escalating. The taxpayer has spent about about R234-million on all nine provinces this year. The most expensive Parliaments are Gauteng, costing more than R48-million and KwaZulu-Natal, costing more than R45-million. The Northern Cape’s Parliament is the least expensive to run, costing almost R12-million.
The cost of the provincial Parliaments in the 1995/1996 financial year was R226- million and the year before R194-million.
It is difficult to evaluate whether or not the taxpayer is getting value for money from the provincial Parliaments.
The head of the Centre for Sociopolitical Analysis at the Human Sciences Research Council, Jabu Sindane, says it is too early to tell, and they should be given time to develop.
“The problem has been that parliamentarians are not always sufficiently responsive to the problems of their constituencies, and they need assistance and information to improve their responsiveness,” he said.
Sindane has released a document on parliamentary accountability, in which he points out that only 28% of respondents in a recent survey said they received regular information on what the governments were doing. He suggests drawing up job descriptions for MPs and MPLs and training them to assist people and how to network.