Cape Town. Gavin Woods, chairman of Parliament's once-powerful public accounts committee, announced his resignation yesterday in protest at the politicisation of the committee and the diminution of its oversight role.

This is the second resignation of a prominent committee member in the wake of its decision to launch a probe into the R53bn arms programme in late 2000. This decision brought the committee into conflict with the executive and it became increasingly politicised as the African National Congress (ANC) packed it with party loyalists.

Late last year, the former leader of the ANC team on the committee, Andrew Feinstein, resigned as an MP on the grounds that political interference made it impossible for him to continue with his work. Both Woods, who is a member of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), and Feinstein were instrumental in the decision to launch the probe, and became more and more beleaguered as the ANC took political control of the body.

Woods said that the history of intervention by the executive and senior ANC officials in the committee's work aimed at subverting a thorough investigation into the arms deal resulted in political infighting. The committee's work on the arms probe had thus been compromised.

Woods criticised the report on the arms deal by the joint investigation team as "substandard" and "superficial". He also believed Parliament had abdicated its responsibility to investigate the deal properly. "I cannot accept the outside interventions and the complicity therewith by the majority of the committee's members which caused the committee to fail in its responsibility to Parliament and the public," said Woods.

Woods's resignation as chairman he remains a committee member from March 1 followed an unsuccessful attempt to restore it to its former nonpartisanship method of operating.