A life-sapping decay has been allowed to seep into the body's oversight role

IN RECENT months the SA public has been seized with questions surrounding the R43bn arms deal. Parliament's standing committee on public accounts' (Scopa's) slow and silent decay in the aftermath of its call for the arms probe has received insufficient attention.

It is a decay that relates to the larger debate on the oversight responsibilities of Parliament.

The committee has become the object of vilification, derision and a concerted campaign to undermine its work. It has been subjected to procedural filibustering, and forced by its African National Congress (ANC) members to abdicate from its oversight duties envisaged in the constitution and the rules of Parliament.

At the end of last year the then unified Scopa took centre stage in investigating the arms deal and asking probing questions about strategic defence procurement. However, this year saw a starkly divided committee pulling in opposite directions, and the executive turning majority party MPs into toy telephones.

The fault line that was built into the committee through the exclusion of the Heath unit from the arms probe by the president will continue to haunt the committee.

Scopa stands divided with a chairman whose motives are under constant suspicion. It has become clear that the ANC cannot afford to be seen to get rid of current chairman Gavin Woods, who spearheaded the committee's call for a full forensic audit of defence procurement.

However, instead of sacking Woods the ANC has opted for the next best option undermining and frustrating him in a bid to force him to resign.

To this end the procedural inventiveness of the ANC has been quite staggering.

All three of Scopa's subcommittees have ANC chairpersons. They aim to direct the work of the committee regarding which hearings will be held, with which departments, and which issues will be taken up by Scopa. The role and initiative of the chairman is restricted in this manner.

In addition, a planning committee was established that tries to take contentious issues embarrassing to the ANC away from the Scopa plenary sessions and therefore from the public eye.

The new main quality required of Scopa members appears to be the mastery of procedural wrangling, not the mastering of financial issues. Instead of working diligently on the issues at hand, including further investigative work on the arms deal, the majority members have avoided any contentious issues.

They slowly yet tactically played a procedural game to introduce a life-sapping decay into the committee's oversight role.

Scopa is on a very slippery slope and is rapidly loosing its credibility due to the inability of members of the majority party to realise that their role is first and foremost to act in accordance with the imperative of legislative oversight and not in the interests of the executive which holds sway over their political future.

The future of Scopa will hold the key to the future of Parliament as an institution and of the scope for good and accountable governance in SA.

Taljaard is DA spokeswoman on public accounts.  

With acknowledgement to Raenette Taljaard and Business Day.