National Assembly 12th November 2009

Speaker,

The IFP will not be supporting these bills today, and we adopt this stance in respect of their content but largely to protest the process through which these bills, and in particular the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Bill, have been rammed through this house. Members received their first presentation by the department only on Tuesday and were expected to vote the following day.

It is quite astonishing that a bill comprising 50 pages of amendments should be presented conceptually in a single meeting of the portfolio committee followed the following day by a brief clause by clause discussion and adoption.

It is the first time in my 15 years in this house that I have witnessed amendments - several of which are longer than a page each - being presented without being read aloud clause by clause, on the assumption that members should have read them earlier or that they were not contentious, or that because members possess amazing speed-reading and comprehension skills, such speed was perfectly acceptable.

Never mind the fact that most members of the committee had never before seen the bill being returned to us from the NCOP because the bill was adopted by this house before the last elections and most members of the committee are new.

The fact is that the process was a charade. Since the bills had been passed by the NCOP on Tuesday afternoon, there was no way of the National Assembly effecting amendments on Wednesday without having to go to mediation. And since the ANC wanted the bills passed now and would not entertain amendments after NCOP adoption, there was clearly little point in scrutinising the bills in detail as one would normally do. Instead, and at the request of the executive, the committee decided to rubberstamp the bill and consider any fallout later.

This is not acceptable, and makes a mockery of the principle of the separation of powers. Because the executive wants a bill passed we pass it without properly exercising our collective minds. We received not a single input from outside of the executive - no inputs from the National or Provincial houses of traditional leaders, no inputs from civil society, no inputs even from the public hearings of the NCOP.

Instead we're expected to accept that because the NCOP has supposedly done its job, we don't have to do ours. It really is astonishing that the ANC permits this.

And the reason for this overly-compliant and slavish 'yes sir, I'll do as you please sir' behaviour? Because a non-functional commission whose term of office has been extended to the end of January 2010 is to be reconstituted, re-focussed and re-launched and in its functioning to confer on qualifying persons a new category of traditional leader called a principal traditional leader sitting conceptually between an inkosi and a king. Frankly, with such important issues to be considered, the bill should have been prioritised for early next year.

Yes, we would have lost a couple of months, but once the bill is passed today does anyone really expect fireworks from a new commission over this year-end and the start of 2010? If you do, you're dreaming.

Well, maybe we should not be surprised by all of this. We thought the ANC in parliament had a mandate to do its job properly, but clearly we were wrong. The way the IFP sees it, if the executive barks, parliament jumps, and that's it, finish and klaar, and we should stop pretending otherwise.