Madam, you will allow me the time, I hope. The DA petitioned our President to send this Bill back, because it tried to write an unprocedural political purge into the law.
There are three provisions dealing with the removal of SABC directors: The first is the old one, under which the board itself can ask the President to remove a member for misconduct or incapacity after due inquiry.
The second is the new provision, which I first proposed a year ago, under which Parliament, as the institution that selects the board members in the first place, may resolve, after a finding of misconduct, incapacity or ineligibility, that an individual member should be removed.
Nothing more than this is needed, as I have said before, for any bona fide case where a member is found unfit. However, this Bill creates a third removal provision: The National Assembly may by simple resolution decide on the dissolution of the entire board for failure to discharge its duties and, by a further vote, recommend five persons, hand-picked, without public nomination or participation or any transparency, as an interim board, which the President must then appoint within ten days - in time for the election, of course.
The absence of any explicit requirement for procedural fairness in this third removal clause stands in stark contrast to the requirement for due inquiry in the two proceeding provisions. In legal terms this may therefore be read to be intentional and thus, constitutionally speaking, to exclude the right to fair procedure. It is this that formed the basis of our petition and it is this that has caused our President's reservations and the sending back of the Bill.
In practical terms, we may remind the House that not only may this omission be read to be intentional, it was intentional: Due inquiry was actually removed from the draft after the SACP's submission. This had been tried before. An unprocedural purge has in fact been tried before.
When you undertake administrative action, you must inform the affected people of the nature and purpose of the proceeding and you must give them a reasonable opportunity to put their case. The unsuspecting board, however, last April at the age of four months, was subjected to a kangaroo court, which I have described here before and which resulted in an attempt at passing a motion of no confidence which failed, thanks to the hon members.
This dissolution clause is a further attempt to achieve the same end. This Bill has been rendered constitutional, thanks to the fact that the President has sent it back, and that we welcome, but the dissolution provision is still unnecessary, it is undesirable and therefore we will still vote against this Bill and also against the idea of an interim board to be appointed for the purposes of the election.
I suspect my ANC colleagues are very relieved that this has been corrected and that they will now have to abandon the attempt to unseat the board. [Interjections.] [Applause.]