PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEES
Mabandla community announced that the red tape involved in obtaining land tenure is one of the major challenges impeding economic development in his area. Addressing the Portfolio
Committee on Economic Development, he said: “The community is running a potentially viable project; the challenge is that we cannot expand. Banks and funding institutions are unable to grant us funding because we do not have land tenure,” said the Chief of this community in rural southern KwaZulu-Natal The committee had visited the
Mabandla forestry project to find out if the parastatal Industrial Development Corporation was providing it with the requisite support. Committee Members were pleased with the potential economic spinoffs of this project and vowed to seek ways in which the project could be further assisted. The serious violence in South
Africa was the subject of the briefing to Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Police by the Minister of Police when he spoke on the Dangerous Weapons Bill. “This is key legislation, especially
in a country where people carry dangerous weapons in protests,” said Minister Nthathi Mthethwa, MP. He conceded that the country is currently grappling with violent crimes and one of the contributing factors is dangerous weapons. Chairperson of the Committee
Ms Annelize van Wyk, MP, took the opportunity to publicly declare that while it was important to pass the legislation, the department needed to do an implementation and roll-out plan and present it to the committee before the Bill was adopted.
Checking programme delivery on the ground Most committee meetings in the parliamentary precinct are confined to three days of the week to allow
Members to keep up with their other duties. Nevertheless, the daily “Z list” which provides Parliament and the public with a week’s programme of committee meetings always runs to more than 10 pages. For example, in a single week
last year the Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services visited Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal to inspect conditions in jails and treatment of offenders. In addition, it considered progress made in the construction of improved prisons. Simultaneously, the Portfolio
Committee on Public Works visited Limpopo to assess the progress made in the implementation of the second phase of the Expanded Public Works Programme. The committee also investigated the Government Immovable Asset Register to make sure that government’s immovable assets in the province were properly registered and accounted for. Meanwhile the Portfolio
Committee on Sports and Recreation
was on an oversight visit to the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng to assess the state of sports facilities that had been built as part of the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup Legacy Programme. The visit focused on access, maintenance, security and mass participation of communities in sports activities using these facilities. These are examples of typical
committee oversight visits; they do not include all the committee meetings and hearings that take place each week. In such ways, oversight as a
guiding principle has become embedded in South Africa’s political culture. Oversight is concerned with the daily bread-and-butter activities that engage Parliament, and this is demonstrated in multiple small but significant ways; every day Parliament’s committees are at work – either within Parliament’s precinct at committee meetings to hear submissions or somewhere in South Africa on oversight inspections.
The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue One - South Africa | 39
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