Some 16 months ago, the Zondo Commission formally handed in its report, which sharply criticised Parliament for the shoddy oversight that allowed State Capture. The question remains, can Parliament move from box-ticking monitoring to qualitative oversight and accountability?
It’s not that no one knows what needs to be done. It’s how it’s being done.
That doing has been to cut the Zondo Commission report into bits of recommendations, matching them up with page and paragraph numbers and allocating them to a structure to deal with. In the Presidency, that would have been ministers mostly; in Parliament, it was mainly committees, but also the presiding officers and the secretary to Parliament.
While such tabulated categorisation makes the approximately 5,500 pages of the Zondo Commission’s findings and recommendations more palatable, it’s a tool to narrow the focus on the technical — away from the qualitative whole.
And with this, the opportunity to “reimagine Parliament” diminishes even as the Zondo Commission’s recommendations are based on the centrality of Parliament in the Constitution, according to Futurelect programme director and politics lecturer Dr Sithembile Mbete at Wednesday’s joint Public Affairs Research Institute (Pari) and Council for the Advancement of the Constitution (Casac) conference on implementing Zondo Commission recommendations.
“We need a shift in our political discourse that moves from speaking of our political system as if it were the US with an executive system, and speak of the parliamentary system we actually have,”…