JOINT SITTING ON THE ELECTRICITY CRISIS: ANC TAKING THE CREDIT
Today Parliament will be holding a joint sitting to discuss the energy crisis that has gripped the country over the last few weeks.
Yesterday, political parties were informed of this special sitting by the Speaker’s office. Media reports have subsequently reported that Speaker Baleka Mbete justified her decision to convene Parliament before the President’s State of the Nation address on 8 February by stating that the current power outages were a concern for her ahead of the Inter-parliamentary Union 118th Assembly to be hosted in Cape Town in April.
But, in reality the Speaker had nothing to do with idea which was almost entirely the DA’s. It is just another example of the ANC dropping the ball and then desperately trying to take credit for someone else’s idea.
There are practical consequences as well, because the party responsible for proposing a debate in Parliament gets the majority of the speaking time in that debate.
The truth is the DA has been calling for Parliament to debate issues as far back as February 2006 when it introduced a notice of motion that called for the National Assembly to discuss the following:
That the House discusses the causes of the interrupted electricity supply to parts of South Africa, particularly the Western Cape, and the action needed to ensure the integrity of the electricity supply to all parts of the country in future.
The ANC chose to ignore this proposal deciding rather to debate issues such as “the contribution and relevance of Satyagraha to our political, economic and social values.”
(If one goes back even further, the DA called on Parliament to debate this issue as long ago as 2001 when it urged the Minerals and Energy Portfolio Committee to summon the Minerals and Energy Department to appear before it to engage with Government on its restructuring of the electricity industry)
Since this notice of motion the DA has called on Government in a number of different ways to deal with the impending energy crisis which has included writing to President Thabo Mbeki to formally request that he appoint an independent commission of enquiry into South Africa’s power supply crisis.
During the last three weeks the DA has called on Parliament to deal with the crisis in two ways.
First, it called on the Minerals and Energy and Public Enterprises Portfolio Committees to hold a joint meeting in order to discuss the crisis and, more importantly, to determine which officials and political office bearers were responsible for the situation. This request was hardly unreasonable given that Parliament’s committee period had already begun for 2008, yet the meeting never took place.
Second, last Monday, DA Chief Whip Ian Davidson wrote to the Speaker, asking her to call a special sitting of Parliament to debate the national emergency that has arisen as a result of the electricity crisis arguing that a problem of such epic proportions could not wait till after Parliament opened on 8 February.
Until yesterday, the DA had received no response from the Speaker regarding this request. It therefore came as a welcome surprise when the party was informed that this debate would in fact take place today.
What was not as surprising was the ANC taking credit for calling for this debate and using the upcoming Inter-parliamentary Union conference as the reason for its decision.
But one only has to look at trends followed by the ANC in the past with regard to joint sittings to question the legitimacy of the party’s sudden change of heart when it comes to dealing with this crisis in Parliament.
Over and above the annual State of the Nation address, the ANC almost always uses joint sittings for celebratory events ( for example, the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Adoption of the Constitution in May 2006, the launch of Parliament’s new emblem in March 2007 and the Heritage day debate last September) or for addresses by foreign heads of state and dipl
| Posted on 30/1/2008
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