South Africa’s Parliament must reassert its constitutional role as the true representative of the people and do its constitutionally entrenched function of framing, debating and passing laws and offering a check on executive power, says official opposition leader Tony Leon.
But the gathering impression is that sleaze is besmirching Parliament and that its teeth are being pulled, the Democratic Alliance (DA) leader argued in his Friday internet column, SA Today.
Referring to Travelgate — the travel-voucher scam — he said: “Fully 32 MPs accepted plea bargains, effectively admitting guilt and agreeing to pay fines. While some of the early African National Congress [ANC] plea-bargainers were fired, the ANC has yet to take action against the latest offenders.”
The president’s question time has been diluted, he charged. “Once a robust site of parliamentary review, it has withered into a tame and largely pointless ritual. Increasingly, the head of state and members of his Cabinet simply decline to answer MPs’ questions.”
This week, another incident brought executive disdain for Parliament and its procedures into sharp focus. The Minister in the Presidency, Essop Pahad, was accused of brokering a R1,43-million sponsorship for writer Ronald Suresh Roberts, who has been at work on a biography on President Thabo Mbeki. “Yet Pahad denied any involvement in reply to a DA parliamentary question in 2004.”
“Did Minister Pahad lie to Parliament? If so, what will the reaction of government be? The incident promises to reveal much about the relationship of the legislature and the executive in coming weeks. What, more pertinently, is Parliament going to do about one of its most senior members and ministers misleading the house?”
Leon said the “tawdry Mbulelo Goniwe affair” that unravelled at the end of last year is merely the most sensational evidence of government’s senior appointees undermining the reputation of the legislature.
Goniwe, the ANC’s then-chief whip, had also hidden behind Parliamentary privilege to evade a court order being served on him for payment of child maintenance. “Through his actions, President Mbeki’s hand-picked appointee gravely tarnished the reputation of our highest legislative body.”
Goniwe was axed subsequently by the ANC — by an internal disciplinary committee — for alleged sexual harassment.
“Our legislature has certainly lost the vibrancy that characterised the years of the first democratic Parliament (1994 to 1999), in which [former] president Nelson Mandela respected the institution and encouraged full-throated participation in its activities.”
Leon suggested that Parliament needs to focus on a vital and responsive legislature “whose health is linked directly to that of our broader democracy: for the erosion of the one means the erosion of the other. After all, parliamentarians are the people’s tribunes, chosen to articulate the people’s interests.” — I-Net Bridge