The National Assembly’s battered image could be restored if Parliament reopens discussions on the arms deal, an independent panel reviewing the performance of the legislature said on Tuesday.
Presenting the panel’s report on Parliament’s performance review initiated in 2006, the panel’s chairperson Pregs Govender said controversies surrounding the arms deal had done tremendous damage to the legislature.
”The panel recommends that Parliament should revisit the arms deal and take such steps as are necessary, including a debate on the adoption of a resolution calling for the appointment of such a judicial commission of enquiry into the arms deal,” she said.
The assessment panel comprising leading political and constitutional experts, including Stellenbosch University Chancellor Frederick van Zyl Slabbert and political analysts Judith February and Sipho Seepe, was commissioned by Parliament.
Its recommendations on the arms deal were tabled a few weeks after President Kgalema Motlanthe rejected a request for the matter to be investigated by an independent commission of inquiry.
National Assembly Speaker Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde said while Parliament welcomed the panel’s findings and recommendations, it was up to the next generation of MPs who would come in after the 2009 elections, to decide whether to implement the recommendations.
The panel also highlighted Parliament’s weak oversight processes, its failure to adequately consult the public on matters of national interest and a failure by its members to adhere to high moral standards.
However, Mahlangu-Nkabinde said the current National Assembly leadership had already initiated a number of processes to rectify many of the weaknesses highlighted in the report.
”We never said we had to wait for the panel to give us a report in order to address certain things — we had continued to do our work,” she said.
The Democratic Alliance said the panel’s recommendations resonated with its views that Parliament had been neglecting its oversight role.
”The DA has repeatedly voiced its concern over the fact that Parliament has increasingly failed to fulfil its constitutional obligations, namely, to ensure oversight over the Executive … to ensure that issues of a national significance are debated and considered,” the party’s chief whip Ian Davidson said in a statement.
The DA, Davidson said, had already taken a number of steps in Parliament with regard to the panel’s recommendations, including calling for a commission of inquiry into the arms deal.
‘Bribes’
New evidence of corruption in the arms deal was disclosed in documents used by the Scorpions to motivate s raids on premises countrywide in late November 2008.
The documents show that ‘commissions†paid to agents by British defence giant BAE Systems total more than £115-million — a staggering R1,73-billion at today’s exchange rate.
They also argue BAE could not produce evidence of legitimate services by their agents which could justify the huge amounts paid to them.
The documents — affidavits by South African and British investigators, financial statements and correspondence — formed the basis for the Scorpions’ secret application to the Pretoria High Court to search seven premises linked to BAE and its agents in November.