Reducing Parliament's oversight committees - A bad idea?

Yesterday, during a meeting of the National Assembly’s Rules Committee, there was a proposal by the ANC to change the NA’s current portfolio committee structure, which would see a reduction in the number of portfolio committees in the House.

Parliament staff member, Francois Basson, told People’s Assembly, “Yesterday there was a brief discussion on clustering portfolio committees… the ruling party’s proposal was that PCs didn’t need to closely mirror national departments and they could be clustered together in a way similar to the NCOP”.

He went on to explain that the Rules Committee had created a sub committee to discuss the matter further and that this task team would report back to the NA Rules Committee next week Wednesday.

DA MP Lance Greyling has been appointed to the sub committee. “We definitely are concerned about this proposal and our position is that to maximise oversight and accountability you need to mirror the ministries. We are also arguing that there is a need for a committee that deals with the Office of the Presidency and perhaps even one for Parliament, so if anything, we need an expansion of the current portfolio committees.” Greyling said.

In rebuttal, long standing ANC MP, Dr Mathole Moshekga, told People’s Assembly, “The ANC proposed that clustering because it believes in the efficiency and effectiveness of Parliament. Clustering would allow members to work in not more that two portfolio committees which means they could focus and specialise … it is not a party political matter, it is about improving the work of Parliament.”

The EFF’s spokesperson and new MP, Floyd Shivambu, told People’s Assembly that his party supported a scaling down of Cabinet, and it was public knowledge that the EFF also wants fewer PCs. He said that the current structure was “not practical… clustering would save time for committees to do their work and properly over see the work done by the departments”.

Greyling disagrees, believing that committees will not get through all their work if they have to oversee more than one department.

“The problem seems to be that the President has appointed a Cabinet that is too large and we now need more committees to match that,” explained Greyling. He went on to say that many ANC MPs have been deployed to Cabinet, which leaves fewer of the ANC’s best MPs to be allocated to portfolio committees.

When asked if there was any further information about which committees the ANC proposed should be grouped together, Basson said that the ANC had not officially tabled a document detailing how the new committees might work and instead they were proposing “the principle of clustering”.

Greyling said that one of the suggestions was to join Public Enterprises and Energy.

According to Shivambu, Mineral Resources and Energy could be clustered, as well as Education and Science and Technology.

**Recent update: The Community Law Centre (UWC), Heinrich Boell Foundation, Parliamentary Monitoring Group, Section 27 and the Women’s Legal Centre have released a press statement regarding the clustering of committees. Read the full statement here.