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One of the things that I am going to do is establish a special task team, to look at issues at how Parliament exercised oversight over the years in regards to the issue of state capture and corruption. It may well be that, as I have said a few times since last year, if Parliament had played its oversight role, some of the challenges may have been dealt with early. It is important to look and see where the may have been failures on the part of Parliament and the part of portfolio committees and see what would need to be done for the future.
These words uttered a few weeks ago by Deputy Chief Justice, Raymond Zondo during the Commission of Inquiry to State Capture should serve as a wake up call to every one of us in the House. What we need to do is restore this House as the ground zero of executive accountability and oversight in South Africa. And so in the words of Lenin, and that's Vladimir, not John, "what is to be done"? A good place to begin to answer this question is to go back to first principles, and look at what the Constitution says we should be doing to do our job properly, scrutinizing and oversight of executive, passing legislation, providing a forum for national debate. We can make a good start at all of this, by ensuring that Ministers are, in the first instance, are actually accountable to this House. This means that we must assert our role as the accountability mechanism and we must insist that Ministers attend properly to their constitutional obligation to account to this House.
In the Fifth Parliament madam Speaker, far too many Ministers were able to escape their executive accountability that this House requires in terms of the Constitution. We had some Ministers which some of them are present today, who did not
appear to this House for over a year to answer oral questions. And when tough questions are asked, Ministers must not be mollycoddled by the presiding officers. Tough questions make tough and good Ministers. It forces them to be on top of their brief and in touch with what is actually going on in their portfolio. Ministers must respond to written questions, they cannot simple be ignored. The Speaker's office should be monitoring the quality and frequency of replies and ensuring that questions that do not pass are sent back to the Minister with a test note ensuring and reminding of their duty to account to this House.
Speaker and Chair, we have to revisit the oversight and accountability model of Parliament. Far too many sections are vague and do not effectively empower us as Members of Parliament to do effective oversight. One such example is individual member oversight in our constituencies. A disturbing practice has started to entrench itself around the country, where Members of Parliament wanting to visit state facilities are now required to get permission from provincial MECs who when there is obviously things going wrong there, makes it very difficult for such
permission to be granted or simple refuse political parties which they are not a member access to these facilities. This makes a mockery and a joke of our responsibility to take what we see on the ground, bring back to Parliament and make sure we fix it. I see that my hon friend from KwaZulu- Natal who was a Health MEC himself is waving his finger with this suggestion today.
Madam Speaker, to be credible, we have got to live up to the values and principles of Parliament. We have got to breathe life into those words that are so beautifully adorn the steps on the way into the National Assembly, that requires us to hold ourselves accountable How do we honestly look at government Ministers and ask them to will our bad elements in their departments and entities when we sat for two years with our own Rotten Apple, Mr Mgidlana the Secretary to Parliament sitting here. I hear what you said Madam Speaker but with respect, we had exactly the same in the last time we debated, that the disciplinary was imminent and that Mr Mgidlana was on the way out. I worry that his contract is going to expire before he is actually held accountable.
It is also very difficult to say that we are cleaning out the Augean stables, when many of people in this own House are implicated and have been elevated to key leadership positions in this House, heading up some of the key levers to exercise oversight and accountability of the architects, enablers and implementers of state capture. They belong behind bars, not behind the committee tables of this House [Applause]. We also need to have to the functioning Efforts Committee and I hope that to receive attention from you. We also need to improve our legislative oversight our ability to engage with legislation. There is imbalance of forces between the executive in this House where the executive come with batteries of legal advisors, content advisors of officials or experts and they bulldoze Parliament out of the way. We need to make sure that there is a balance of forces and that we are capacitated.
Madam Speaker we also need a proper forum for public debate and this is why I want to turn my attention to the events of what happened last week. Those are the antithesis of what a democratic Parliament should be witnessing. Let me be clear, not only was it not a legitimate democratic action as the hon Ndlozi
said, no matter how hard the EFF try to cloak them as such. They were the antithesis of what this House means and what it should achieve. Perhaps a warning was spelt out for us by one of the EFF's own lodestars, Karl Marx who famously said, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce", and what a farce it is.
We heard today that the revolution is to come to Parliament. I have got good news: The revolution landed in Camps Bay two weeks ago. So, fear not, democrats, as that is not the sound of tanks rolling into Parliament; it is the drinks trolley taking in the Veuve Clicquot and Meerlust Rubicon into the EFF's caucus room! [Applause]. We have seen this type of behaviour before. We have witnessed it. In history, it was on full display in the Reichstag of the late 1930s. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, regardless of their relatively small size, wore boots and uniforms in the House. Sound familiar? Whenever they disproved of a speaker, they simply disrupted them. Sound familiar? When they could not get their way, they rendered Parliamentary sittings impossible and incapable of proceeding. Sound familiar?
We must not allow what was a culmination of that behaviour in Germany with its awful consequences to ever happen in this Parliament [Applause]. The rules must be applied and this behaviour must be condemned and the EFF needs to consistent. If you are going to prevent people from Public Protector reports here, then you need to be consistent about On-Point Engineering as well. [Applause].
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