Barry Streek
The African National Congress has quietly abandoned the last Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) structure – the RDP portfolio committee in the National Assembly.
Although the RDP remains official government and ANC policy, the programme launched with great fanfare in April 1994 with a minister, a department and a parliamentary monitoring committee has now disappeared.
The decision to drop the RDP portfolio committee, which was completely inactive in the last Parliament, comes despite a public pledge in February 1997 by the ANC’s previous chief whip, Max Sisulu, to revitalise it.
It also comes after an audit finding last year by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and Wits University’s Graduate School of Public and Development Management that the implementation of the RDP had been uneven.
The audit did, however, conclude that the RDP, through which the ANC had committed itself to narrowing the country’s social wealth, showed that the government largely managed to set down the right policy.
In February 1997, Sisulu released a document with a proposal to restore and upgrade the status of the RDP committee in Parliament “to create a new driving force for the RDP vision, to monitor and report on RDP achievements and to restore the high public profile of the RDP, in the light of the president’s strong public commitment to it”.
Sisulu, who was the first chair of the RDP committee in Parliament and who was one of the editors of the original RDP base document, said then that the concept was slumbering in hiatus, but far from dead.
“The RDP is, of course, a very popular concept and still exists in the hearts and minds of the people, but we know that with the closure of the office, the RDP has lost visibility.”
Sisulu said that much discussion had taken place within government and the ANC concerning how to relaunch the RDP.
“The consensus is that there is a need for an RDP committee in Parliament to drive the process.”
The intention was that it would monitor legislation and policies for RDP content, call ministers and public servants to account, host public hearings and liaise with provincial governments.
He wanted the RDP committee to be a major “watchdog” committee along the lines of the public accounts committee.
Sisulu concluded by saying that disbanding the RDP committee or leaving it on the margins of Parliament “could be disastrous for the ANC, local, provincially and nationally”.
Afterwards, the committee was revived, in theory, with ANC KwaZulu-Natal MP Lech Tsenoli as its chair. But the committee did not meet and it seemed to run out of steam
When the ANC released its national working committee’s list of proposed chair, no one was nominated to chair the RDP committee. The ANC national working committee has decided that it will be abolished.