The chamber of the National Assembly of South Africa. CC image courtesy of Kaihsu Tai.
Four members of South African opposition party the Democratic Alliance (DA) have walked out of a portfolio committee meeting on communications and telecommunications and postal services, claiming they had not been given enough time to examine a strategic plan.
“The committees, which met for the first time, only received the Department of Communications’ 100-page strategic plan this [yesterday] morning and, a full committee programme during the day had prevented us from reading the document in preparation for engaging with the department on its plans for the coming year,” said DA shadow minister of telecommunications and postal services Marian Shinn.
Shinn said a request submitted to the committee’s chairperson to postpone the meeting until Thursday was rejected by Telecommunications and Postal Services Portfolio Committee chairperson Mmamoloko Kubayi.
According to the DA the request was rejected because the department’s executives had been in Pretoria all day and could not be inconvenienced.
A followup request was submitted to committee co-chairperson of the communications committee Joyce Moloi-Moropa in order to have the meeting delayed by an hour was also rejected.
“We felt that we would be unable to properly do our job of parliamentary oversight and holding the executive to account without having appropriate time to prepare. The DoC’s document has been ready for some time and could have been sent to committee members well in advance of today’s meeting,” Shinn said.
The DA said it is aware the committee is under pressure to meet budget deadlines, therefore it is suspicious committee chairpersons were unwilling to allow a thorough investigation of the document.
“The co-chairs also denied committee members opportunities to engage with communications minister Faith Muthambi and telecommunications minister Siyabonga Cwele on public pronouncements they have made in the past fortnight on departmental issues, such as the proposal to give the minister of communications power to hire and fire SABC board members,” Shinn said.
