ANC chief whip Mnyamezeli Booi promised on Thursday that Parliament would be rigorous in its examination of the sacking of National Prosecuting Authority head Vusi Pikoli.
Parliament will meet a week earlier than planned to put together an ad hoc committee to prepare a report on the decision of the president to overturn the recommendation of the Ginwala commission that Pikoli should stay.
Parliament is entitled by law to have the last word on the matter, and Booi told a press briefing in his offices that the process would not be a rubber-stamp affair.
“We are not here to say: ‘The president has spoken and we’ll go along with that’,” Booi said.
“We don’t trivialise this. It has got constitutional implications. We aren’t just going to listen to what the president is saying.”
Booi said the committee, once constituted on January 12, would study the Ginwala report and the president’s decision.
It would also look at what the media have had to say about it and what political analysts have said.
“Are we keeping to the rule of law, or are we just doing it for some political expediency?”
He added that he wanted even the opposition to be sure that Parliament was running the matter in a very open and transparent manner.
Asked whether there was any chance at all that the committee would come to a different decision than the president, Booi said he declined to speculate.
His deputy Bulelani Magwanishe told journalists that Pikoli himself would be able to make representations to the committee, although it would be up to the committee to decide whether or not it will accept representations in oral or written form. — I-Net Bridge