Madam Chairperson, hon members, in deference to the many preachers of different faiths present in this House, I shall borrow a little from their style and begin as I will end. If we wish to have a truly activist parliament, then we need first to have an activist people.
Not, of course, that we can actually argue against having an activist parliament. That would be a bit like saying that what we want is a parliament that's dead on its feet with apathy. We want a parliament that is active, engaged and busy.
It's safer to assume that all the members of this House want an institution that is wholly committed to representing the interests of the people with vigour and integrity. This means that we want to focus on those factors that limit the effectiveness of our oversight function, for example, the woeful lack of capacity of many of the committees. We need more staff and more resources to make our committees work more effectively.
Being an activist parliament means much more than having a huge staff of researchers or a lavish overseas tour budget. Rather, it means having the will and independence to go seeking issues, and being prepared, where necessary, to confront the executive authorities of our country. Some recent examples will show how far we have to go. Does our defence committee, for example, seek to investigate the claims that we are selling arms to countries with shocking records of human rights abuse; or does it act to shield the Ministers from the questions of committee members?
We have a long way to go before we have a defence committee that can act, as their counterparts in the House of Commons did recently, when their chairperson criticised the United Kingdom's Minister of Defence for the standard of equipment being supplied to their frontline troops. That is what it means to be independent from the executive, and that is what it means to exercise real oversight.
Our labour committee that recognised the need to examine the plight of millions of South Africans, for whom casual labour is the best employment they can find, is another example. Instead of seeking to understand the difficult choices such workers have to make, the committee heard a torrent of self-righteous bluster akin to human trafficking. This was a further example of ideological posturing at the expense of real activism.
The institution of Parliament can only go so far when it comes to improving the standards of public accountability. For us in this House to realise our ambition of truly engaging the poor, we need to be accessible to the broad masses of our population. Engaging the people still seems to mean the mass meetings we know as izimbizo, or the road shows like Taking Parliament to the People. These events can so easily become mere window dressing, if there is no engagement with, or better still, listening to and acting on the complaints of the people.
Why, for example, did we have to wait until 2009 for a presidential instruction to principals, to make it clear that teachers are expected to be present in their classrooms every day, actually teaching? We have had a South African Schools' Act since 1996, which set up school governing bodies with powers to monitor what is happening in our schools. We need to empower parents and our communities to use the powers given to them in the legislation.
If we have a truly activist population, we will see citizens demanding proper service. We shouldn't have to wait for the tyres to start burning and the bullets to fly before we, in this House, realise that there is a problem.
For this level of engagement to become a reality, we need education which goes beyond mere literacy teaching. We need people who can read, understand and interrogate documents such as Mr Manuel's Green Paper on Planning. I, for example, was taught more about literacy teaching by a former member of this House, Willie Hofmeyr, than any lecturer I ever had, and I know that if we want an empowered citizenry, we have to teach a literacy which empowers people to ask questions and engage meaningfully with what they are told by the so-called experts. Then, and only then, can we talk about having become an activist parliament which is able to provide all citizens, rich or poor, urban or rural, with the standard of government that they expect and deserve. I thank you. [Applause.]