Barry Streek
The arms deal investigators Auditor General Shauket Fakie, Public Protector Selby Baqwa and National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka will face six parliamentary committees in public next week in the climax to Parliament’s hearings on the arms deal report.
The chairperson of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa), Gavin Woods, said MPs had a constitutional right to ask the investigating team any questions as long as they were relevant.
But with the African National Congress insisting that the investigation has cleared the government of corruption in the deal and seeking to rush through parliamentary hearings on the report, opposition parties may find the scope for probing questions limited.
Three Democratic Alliance members walked out of a defence committee meeting this week, after the ANC majority rejected a call for Minister of Defence Mosiuoa Lekota to give evidence in person.
Speaker Frene Ginwala said the December 5 deadline for reports from the six committees was not final, as many had assumed.
“I advised all committees, including Scopa, that it was necessary for them to present reports which would indicate programmes, preliminary or interim actions, or recommendations,” she said in a letter to the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). The reports would be published so that the public would be aware of what was being proposed, and how the many areas covered by the joint investigating team would be addressed.
Ginwala said that if there were recommendations for action or reports requested from the executive, she intended conveying these to the relevant departments or ministers even before the National Assembly adopted the committees’ reports in February.
She also said no member of the public could be precluded from making submissions to a parliamentary committee. However, committees had the right to decide that the submissions could only be in writing.
Idasa protested to Ginwala after its request to give oral evidence to Scopa was turned down.
Committees will be entitled to withdraw from the hearings (on Tuesday and Wednesday) once they feel it is no longer necessary for them to be present. Woods said he expected Scopa members and the defence committee would be present for the full two days.