Scopa member Vincent Smith has been described as a “master filibusterer”
Marianne Merten
For someone who admits to an initial reluctance to serve on Parliament’s public accounts committee (Scopa), African National Congress MP Vincent Smith has proved a key player in the committee’s unravelling.
Smith rejects claims he politicised the committee to prevent it overseeing the arms deal, and remains adamant he is just doing his job as an ANC MP.
“There is no Scopa party,” he says.
“People in Scopa were a real team when I joined it. And there is nothing wrong with being a team. But I firmly believe that I am in politics and in Parliament not to conform, but to transform.
“Because of the different style of operation that I and some other members I don’t think I was the only member adopted, things had to change at Scopa. Certainly the ANC component had to change.”
And it changed. Unlike the situation during the R14-million Sarafina debacle when the ANC component insisted on non-partisanship, Scopa is now bogged down in partisan bickering. And it is understood Parliament is now considering a review of the role and function of committees.
This week Inkatha Freedom Party MP Gavin Woods resigned as committee chairperson, complaining of his frustration over the politicisation of the committee and executive interference in its work. He indicated it had failed to exercise proper oversight over the arms deal probe.
Last year Woods complained that the committee had started to defer to the ANC on other issues. One example was its refusal to interrogate the row over ANC-linked Home Affairs director-general Billy Masetlha’s contract.
Amid the arms deal furore last year Beeld newspaper described Smith as “a little like a cleaner in a Quentin Tarantino movie” in a reference to the Pulp Fiction character who disposes of embarrassing dead bodies and as a smaller version of presidential spin-doctor Essop Pahad.
An ambitious career politician, he is understood to have said that the handling of the arms deal would be his “political Rubicon”.
Smith feels the ANC perspective has been drowned by the negative publicity.
“Scopa: The ANC Perspective Document” is written on the whiteboard in his office; it has been pending for several months.
He insists it has been “in the interest of certain individuals” to portray the committee as dysfunctional. “I disagree Scopa is politicised.
“[Democratic Alliance MP] Raenette Taljaard comes to Scopa after consulting her chief whip and she is right to do so. If Gavin Woods didn’t need to consult the IFP, that’s well and good. But in the organisation I come from, we have to consult.”
It would be a mistake to underestimate Smith’s intelligence, smooth tongue and political acumen. One observer described him during the arms deal imbroglio as a “master filibusterer”, tying the committee’s oversight endeavours in procedural knots.
Never aggressive, he left it to fellow ANC committee members Bruce Kannemeyer, Billy Nair and others to put the boot into Woods, who believes there was a deliberate move to marginalise and undermine him.
Smith’s style may have been honed in difficult boardroom negotiations over the transformation at Transnet, which he joined in 1994 as part of the first intake of senior black officials.
He says he took the lead in negotiating racially sensitive details. “Some of us were not popular on both sides black people expected us to do the things they wanted and white people thought we were the devil incarnate.”
His “access to people in [ANC] decision-making positions” dates back to those days. His reputation as a political trouble-shooter dates back to the mid-1990s, when he started the first of three terms as ANC Johannesburg deputy chairperson.
Some say he was behind the sidelining and eventual replacement of Collin Matjila as Johannesburg executive committee chairperson, and at the forefront of disciplining Soweto councillor Trevor Ngwane, who was suspended for two years for criticising the controversial iGoli 2002 plan.
Smith (41) is reluctant to talk about his post-school days. “I went to a convent in Natal and resurfaced after 1994,” he says, adding he was involved in ANC youth structures before the party’s unbanning. Some speculate he was in exile.
His nomination for Parliament in 1999 was a surprise. He was not on the ANC’s initial election list, but was selected number 29 of 39 by May. Smith, by then a senior executive at Spoornet and “very comfortable”, was given a week to come to Cape Town.
Surprise also surrounds his move to Scopa his first choice was the public enterprise committee. “Up to this day I don’t know why I was made (Scopa) deputy chairperson.”
In the wake of opposition parties’ dismay over Woods’s resignation, Smith is confident Scopa will undergo a renaissance under a new chairperson. Party loyalty does not compromise the committee’s oversight over public finances, he insists. “I have no guilt saying that I am a member of the ANC, because the ANC’s principles espouse anti-corruption and anti-mismanagement.”
Citing President Thabo Mbeki’s condemnation of civil servants who fail to do their job, he promises the committee will not go easy on “comrades”.
Smith adamantly denies he has his eyes on the post of Scopa chair- person. “Don’t you think that’s exactly what the media is clamouring for? They want to say: ‘He fought so hard because he was feathering his own nest’.”
Arms and the MPs, Page 18 The last rites have been read, Page 20