The problem facing the increasingly beleaguered Speaker of the National Assembly, Frene Ginwala, is that she is wearing too many political hats.

She is a committed and long-standing member of the majority party in Parliament, an elected member of its national executive committee and its national working committee. She is at the very centre of political power within the African National Congress and she freely participates in its structures.

“You must remember that I am a politician,” she said this week. “And I became a politician before I became a speaker.”

Yet, as speaker of the National Assembly, she is accountable to Parliament and all its members.

Can Ginwala, the politician, be accountable to both the ANC and be answerable to Parliament? This is a problem in many democratic governments, not just in South Africa. Ginwala said there has to be some tension between the executive and Parliament, but she stressed that this did not mean confrontation.

She is convinced she has stood up for the rights of Parliament and believes she has not been given sufficient credit for what she has done to defend it.

As an example, she cited a letter she wrote to Deputy President Jacob Zuma in his capacity as leader of government business, asserting Parliament’s right to investigate issues brought to it by the auditor general.

When the Ministry of Defence supplied secret documents on the arms deal to the standing committee on public accounts and asked for them back, she told them they could get them only when Parliament was ready to return them.

She could have cited other examples as well, such as when she publicly reprimanded two ANC MPs for abusing their expenses.

Opposition MPs concede that she has been an effective speaker who has defended the role of Parliament and who has created space for minority parties to have their say. But, as reflected in this week’s outspoken letter to her by the normally placid chair of the public accounts committee, Gavin Woods, some also feel she demonstrated her political commitment to the ANC rather to Parliament in the investigation into the R50-billion arms deal.

They also feel she revealed her loyalty to the ANC rather than to Parliament when she tried to discipline Pan Africanist Congress MP Patricia de Lille for naming various ANC MPs who had allegedly received payments from the apartheid government.

They feel she did the same with Parliament’s somewhat limp response to the unconstitutional attack by the former minister of minerals and energy, Penuell Maduna, on former auditor general Henri Kluever for allegedly covering up the theft of R170-million in oil money.

Ginwala says speakers in other countries often play a political as well as a presiding officer role and sometimes even act as head of government. But in Britain, the speaker resigns from his or her party and has never been removed from office when there has been a change of government. A Labour Party speaker remains in office even if a Tory government is elected.

After they retire, speakers are elevated to the House of Lords where they sit on the benches as independent members rather than rejoining their former party. Former House of Commons speaker Betty Boothroyd, a veteran Labour Party activist, is now an independent member of the House of Lords.

Former South African and now Labour Party MP Barbara Follett said this tradition is “accepted by all parties. It does work well. As speaker you have to be impartial and you have to resign the whip.”

One of the last speakers in the apartheid Parliament, Louis le Grange, resigned from the National Party caucus after he become Parliament’s presiding officer. He only attended the year’s first and last meetings of the NP caucus — and then only as an observer — because he felt so strongly about the independence of his position.

The secretary of the Western Cape legislature and the last secretary of the Senate, Pieter Pretorius, wrote a master’s thesis in 1992 on the office of speaker in the South African Parliament.

Pretorius refused to be drawn into the current dispute on grounds that he was still part of the “legislative family”, but said: “I have sympathy with any speaker in a similar situation, because you need to balance all the interests and still come out with the support of the whole house.”

He concluded in his thesis, a copy of which is kept in the parliamentary library, after researching democratically elected legislatures throughout the world, that in a constitutional dispensation based on proportional representation it would be essential that the speaker retain “the absolute independent and impartial nature of the office”. Pretorius also emphasised that presiding officers should try to ensure they had credibility among all MPs and all political parties.

Such a role is well-nigh impossible for someone who is a member of the national executive of the ruling party, as Ginwala is discovering in the arms deal controversy. Neither she nor the ANC are likely to change their positions in the wake of the current conflict about her role, but it is a great pity they did not set a different precedent in South Africa’s post-1994 democracy.  

With acknowledgment to Barry Streek and the Daily Mail & Guardian.