/ 30 November 2022

Phala Phala report handed to the National Assembly speaker

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The speaker of the National Assembly, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. (Photo by Gallo Images/Brenton Geach)

Parliament’s Section 89 committee, tasked with deciding whether President Cyril Ramaphosa has committed a serious offence regarding the Phala Phala scandal, has handed its report to the speaker of the National Assembly, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula.

The three-part report, based on written submissions by a number of parties, including the president, will be made available to MPs on Wednesday evening as part of the programming for document distribution.

Mapisa-Nqakula said the panel report would be debated by parliament on 6 December, at which point the house would vote on whether to take further action by a single majority.

The speaker said the panel inquiry was “one of the indicative milestones of our constitutional democracy” and had a mandate to “make a recommendation to the speaker whether sufficient evidence exists to show whether the president committed a serious violation of the Constitution or law or committed a serious act of misconduct”.

The panel’s chairperson, retired chief justice Sandile Ngcobo, said their job had not been to make referrals to the police or any other entity but had been to “interrogate the information that members of the assembly saw fit to present to us”, which they had done.