Marion Edmunds
Parliament aims to close early this year, on September 23, to free up parliamentarians for constituency work and electioneering, in anticipation of next year’s election which may be held as late as July 1999.
This early deadline puts extraordinary pressure on the year’s legislative programme — and exposes South Africans to a lengthy period of electioneering, running from the end of September through the first half of 1999, broken only by a short parliamentary session in early 1999 to pass the Budget.
Chief whips from political parties say that the September date is not set in stone, but is part of an attempt to reduce parliamentary activity to half-a-year’s work, the norm during the days of the National Party government.
Parliamentary sessions since 1994 have taken up the whole year, as parliamentarians struggle to get through an increasingly heavy workload. The extended sessions and late hours are costly and have put enormous strain on MPs’ family life, and caused them to neglect their constituencies, on which they hope to focus from September.
“It’s very bizarre,” said Steven Friedman, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, commenting this week on the early break-up date. “In many cases, if not all, those three months from September will be used for members of Parliament to introduce themselves to an electorate which they have forgotten was there.
“This is about MPs waking up, and it is after the fact. The whole point about representation is that if you want to build up links with the electorate, you must do it during the five years of government.
“There is a very strong divide in MPs’ heads between the business of government and the business of representing voters, and that divide is a misunderstanding because parliamentarians are meant to do both at the same time.”
Parliament hopes to pass almost 150 Bills this year in three sessions, more than were passed last year in four sessions. Twenty Bills are already standing over from last year, and will be dealt with in the first session, which starts on February 2.
These include the Electoral Commission Amendment Bill, which weakens the Independent Electoral Commission’s independence, the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Bill, which regulates South African mercenary activity abroad, and the controversial Prevention of Unlawful Occupation of Land Bill, which regulates squatting. The Department of Justice alone has 20 Bills to pass.
Martin Schsnteich, the parliamentary affairs manager of the Institute of Race Relations, said the load of Bills and the short time in which to pass them was bad for the legislative process. “I fear what will happen will be the same as happened last year when most of the controversial Bills were pushed through in the last six weeks and there was not time for sufficient debate, consultation or criticism,” he said.
The head of Idasa’s Parliamentary Information Monitoring Service, Richard Calland, said the September deadline was unworkable and unrealistic. “The important time to do constituency work is during the time of passing legislation and policy- making, and I don’t see constituency work at the end of the year as terribly useful,” he said.
Significantly, parliamentarians are to receive training throughout the year to make them more efficient, presentable and electorate-friendly. This will include special training on how to do constituency work, and in the first week of the session, training sessions on how to handle the media, including mastering the “sound-bite” for television and radio. The electronic media session will be led by a former journalist, Luci Page, the wife of Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting Jay Naidoo.
President Nelson Mandela will make his opening speech on February 6, and set the tone for a year that is expected to be fraught with confrontations as political parties seek to raise their profiles among the electorate.
Friedman believes that the election campaigns will be bitter. “I think if what I understand was going on at the ANC’s Mafikeng conference continues, there will be an attempt to make it a bitter campaign, because it will be seen as a way to unify the ANC.
“The more you can mobilise against the Nats and the Democratic Party, the more those sorts of differences in the ANC — which threaten Mbeki as president of the ANC and make him uncomfortable — close,” he said.
CAPTION: Opening of Parliament: But this year it will close months early. photo: rodger bosch