Occasionally the African National Congress comes up with a really good idea to improve governance and strengthen democracy. Then, upon contemplating the implications for the party’s future, they give a collective shudder and drop it as if scalded.
This always unfolds roughly the same way. Someone has a nostalgia attack for when the ANC held the moral high ground and actually wanted to establish a vibrantly democratic society that put the ordinary citizen first. He or she has a bright idea.
Transported by the moment, there is back slapping in the ranks. Then the euphoria slowly subsides and the import of increased accountability and public participation sink in.
These are invariably not good for a party that is engaged in unbridled snuffling in the public purse. Upon sober evaluation of the snout-to-trough threat factor, the “good” idea is allowed quietly to pine away from neglect.
Parliament’s 2009/210 annual report, which was released last week and largely ignored by the media and oddly also by the parties themselves, is a case in point. It is one of those slick, blandly phrased publications that conceals more than it reveals.
Soft-soaped into invisibility is one of those briefly brilliant ANC ideas — an independent assessment of Parliament by a panel of South Africa’s great and good — that flashes through the political firmament and then is gone. Their brief was to recommend how Parliament could best evolve to ensure “accountability, responsiveness and openness”.
The antecedents were not good. Years back former president Thabo Mbeki had appointed Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert — who as leader of the opposition during the apartheid years had won ANC plaudits for turning his back on the white Parliament — to examine deficiencies in SA’s system of pure proportional representation.
Slabbert recommended that aspects of constituency-based accountability be introduced. Belatedly realising that this would backfire badly on unpopular cadres deployed as MPs, the ANC quietly shelved the Slabbert report.
But with some ANC heavyweights on the panel, including Max Sisulu, now the Speaker of Parliament, surely this time it would be different? After all, following the ousting of Mbeki — who had ridden roughshod over Parliament and cowed the ANC caucus into snivelling submission — the new administration was keen to reassert legislative oversight of the executive.
The panel’s report was released in January last year, following cross-party meetings with MPs in which “candid criticisms were raised of the problems that impeded their Constitutional mandate”, including the “difficulties in holding the executive accountable”. It reiterated the finding of the earlier Slabbert report, that the electoral system needed “urgent reform” and as well as dealing with a range of house-keeping issues, came up with ways of improving parliamentary standards of participation and ethics.
After an initial flurry of excitement upon the report’s release, nothing further. Six months later it had still not been debated. The opposition Democratic Alliance’s Ian Davidson wrote to Sisulu asking him to table it urgently, arguing that not to do so would leave the suspicion that it was all “an empty exercise … rather than a purpose-driven attempt to improve best democratic practice”.
At present the report is suspended in bureaucratic treacle. It was never fully debated but instead referred to the Joint Rules Committee which 20 months later is yet to sit. Parliamentary spokesperson Luzuko Jacobs says the report is “definitely” not being buried.
It appears from the DA website that the party never raised the matter again. Maybe the DA team had one of those nap attacks, like the one that caused them to sleep through President Jacob Zuma’s eight-month delay in filing a report of his financial interests.
Whatever happened, the upshot is that the parliamentary torpor and inadequacies that the report hoped to address continue. And another good idea is in danger of biting the dust.
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