Travelgate threatens to drastically undermine parliamentary credibility and public trust in the institution.
Speaker Baleka Mbete correctly says ‘innocent until proven guilty”. Of course. But even if no MP is convicted of corruption, enough is already known to be able to say that there has been a substantial systems failure in one of the key institutions of democratic governance.
It is clear that the procedure for claiming expenses and using vouchers for travel between constituencies and Cape Town was as holed as Unites States President George W Bush’s case for the invasion of Iraq and as dodgy as a British Prime Minister Tony Blair dossier.
Moreover, it is inconceivable that such a collapse in the system could have occurred by accident; the scale is self-evidently too great. In other words, someone is culpable.
Yet, caution and patience must remain the watchwords until the investigation is complete. While it is already evident that some MPs willfully took advantage of the flaws in the system, others may well have been unwitting accomplices to a fraud.
In time, the investigation — assuming it is properly conducted — will enable us to distinguish the one from the other. Nonetheless, it is Parliament the institution, as much if not more so than the individual MPs, that stands in the dock. Rumours about this travel scam have been around for years. During the first democratic Parliament of 1994 to 1999, there were murmurings that the system for managing MPs’ travel was not up to scratch.
In those days, however, few of the systems were up to scratch. Parliament was adjusting from being a part-time, amateurish place to being a full-time, professional and modern institution. Although things have improved markedly, the recent experience of MPs newly elected in April, suggests that the induction process still leaves a lot to be desired.
Induction is terribly important. Any new job appears strange at first. There are new systems and procedures to get used to. In Parliament the strangeness tends to be compounded by the uniqueness of the context — with its complex legislative process, arcane lores and manners. It is easy to get lost. Many of the very first intake of 1994 were treated with such disdain by the existing bureaucracy that it took the majority of them the full term to work out where they were supposed to be at any given moment, never mind what the third reading of a Section 76 Bill meant.
Therefore, the high-water mark of any defence for MPs implicated in Travelgate is that they were unclear about the system and made an innocent, if negligent, mistake.
I suspect that the public will have little patience for such a defence. These are perfectly intelligent, grown men and women, elected to lead and represent. They ought to know and understand the system and ensure that it is applied honestly.
What I suspect has happened is that an unseemly habit developed over a number of years. Most people in Parliament knew the system was flawed. Many knew that there were opportunities for the unscrupulous. Many turned a blind eye; others permitted a negligent, permissive culture to develop. Cynically, a number of cowboy travel agents took advantage.
Years passed and no one was arrested. Last year then-speaker Frene Ginwala announced that no MPs were involved, which was a plainly premature and unwise attempt to deflect growing concern about the matter.
If such a culture has developed within Parliament, then the price may be very high. Public trust is already somewhat precarious. The most recent Afrobarometer survey found that last year only 31% of people trusted Parliament most of the time (down 2% from the 1999 survey). This figure compares unfavourably with other parliaments in the region. For example, the equivalent figure for the Namibian Parliament was 42,5%, for Ghana 48,1% and for Botswana 36,9%.
The Kenyan Parliament, in a survey completed after the post-Daniel arap Moi reforms, enjoyed a figure of 53,4%, though it would be surprising if that figure is sustained now, given the recent revelations of corruption in the new administration. The Kenyan case shows how quickly the tide can turn and how the integrity of those in leadership is crucial to the credibility of the political process.
When asked in a 1999 survey: ‘How many people in Parliament do you think are involved in corruption?”, 45,6% of South Africans said ‘all” or ‘most”. Yet, in fact, until Travelgate, South Africa’s Parliament has by and large been a paragon of virtue.
While people’s attention may have been drawn to the case of Tony Yengeni and one or two other high-profile individuals, compared with the provincial legislatures and the executive, national representatives have set a good example — as they should.
The timing of the current scam is unfortunate, coming as it does at a delicate moment in Parliament’s history, in which it faces a crossroads between relevance and irrelevance.
Decisive, swift action and a credible investigation are essential if public trust is not to be lost. In particular, it provides a stern test for the leadership credentials of Mbete, who has the authority to conduct her own investigation. If she fails, she may find herself a lame duck speaker of a lame-duck Parliament.