CAN the speaker of Parliament be a political activist?

We know that our speaker, Frene Ginwala, engages regularly in her party's political activities, and attends meetings of its governing and policy body.

In England, where parliamentary democracy was born, a speaker is barred from political activities and is required by protocol to socialise equally with members of all parties to avoid even the perception of political bias. Even in our own tradition, I remember Johan Greeff telling me that Prime Minister John Vorster had stressed to him that he was not the government's speaker and that his job was to protect opposition parties.

In line with traditional parliamentary democracy, our constitution does not identify the powers of the speaker, which are usually set by accepted precedents.

What is clear is that the present debacle will shape our new parliamentary democracy. Parliamentary procedures are the result of precedents and are seldom entrenched in law or in the constitution. Bad precedents set parliamentary democracy back, often forever.

The manner in which our institutions are reacting in respect of the arms procurement investigation is posing just such a threat. In particular, through this process, the institution of the speaker may be shaped outside anything known in most established democracies, and stay as such for many decades to come.

On May 13 the speaker accused a party leader, Bantu Holomisa, of defamation for his allegation that she stalled the processing of Parliament's public accounts committee's report on the arms procurement and made public remarks implying the rejection of such report and the sidelining of the committee from the investigation of this scandal.

Two days earlier the speaker wrote to committee chairman Gavin Woods implying she was defamed, and requesting him to apologise for having stated the committee had been "sidelined" from the investigations by "interventions" by the speaker who, it was alleged, of her own accord and quasi-secretively, effectively ruled the investigating bodies are not accountable to parliament. As Woods's chief whip I had to rush in to protest he had done nothing wrong. All this is unprecedented.

Issues of this nature would ordinarily be adjudicated by a speaker required by praxis to always be above parties and issues, but here she is right in the centre of it. The concerns about the speaker's role are compounded by the committee thus far not having considered the obvious option of conducting further own investigations, exercising the powers it has under the constitution, rather than endlessly debating whether it should monitor and hold accountable the investigating agencies. Could the speaker withhold from it the resources needed to hold further own investigations?

Members of Parliament should raise the dignity of the speaker by discarding the allegations against her, provided that we recognise the problematic nature of her conduct which prompted them. It is alleged our speaker exercised powers of her own, with no basis in a speaker's traditional role.

The issue is not personal but institutional. The concern is that the speaker has played a disproportionately prominent role in the interactions between the committee and executive on the procurement controversy, which is far from the model of a speaker who speaks only as mandated by the house.

The question now facing SA is whether the powers of speakers shall include those which ours has arrogated to herself, and what this means for our democracy. Will our speaker continue to be the object of debacles? Accepting the precedents set in the arms procurement probe may mean to accept the executive monitoring Parliament instead of vice versa, and the speaker controlling the house rather than vice versa.

Van der Merwe is the parliamentary chief whip of the Inkatha Freedom Party. 

With acknowledgment to Koos van der Merwe and Business Day.