Today, Water and Human Settlements Portfolio Committee Chairperson, Machwene Semenya, brought the Committee to an adjournment 30 minutes before the Committee was set to conclude, in an attempt to prevent Democratic Alliance (DA) MPs from asking the Director General (DG) and the Deputy Minister (DM) of the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS), David Mahlobo, follow up questions on the Department’s failures.
The DA attempted to question the DM and DG on a number of matters, including the Department’s failure to table their end of year report; the alleged plans he has put in motion in order to resolve on-going water shortages in district municipalities across the country; and the wholescale failure of a number of provinces to spend their allocated 2nd quarter budgets. Instead of permitting follow-up questions to wholly inadequate answers, Chairperson Semenya protected officials by instead opting to close the meeting early.
The DA will now escalate this issue to Cedric Frolick, the Chair of Chairs, and we encourage the media to attend future Water and Sanitation and Human Settlements Portfolio Committee meetings, to ensure that the public are made aware of the Chairperson’s apparent attempts to prevent the opposition from holding the Executive to account.
This is not the first time the Chairperson has refused Members the opportunity to ask officials questions. In a joint meeting of the Portfolio Committees for Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs and Water and Sanitation in October, Chairperson Semenya adjourned the meeting an hour early, despite more than 30 departmental officials having travelled to the meeting to respond to MPs at the tax-payers expense. The meeting was convened a week later, where again, officials were forced to travel to Cape Town to answer questions that could have been resolved in the originally allocated time frame. MPs are also frequently given a time allocation of no more than 3 minutes to ask questions regarding the work of both departments, this, despite the committee being scheduled to sit from 09h30 – 13h00 every Tuesday and Friday.
The consolidation of the Department of Human Settlements with the Department of Water and Sanitation into a single portfolio, has resulted in a significant backlog of work for the parliamentary committee to deal with.
Despite opposition MPs being routinely refused their Constitutional right to exercise their oversight role within the Committee, Chairperson Semenya has also cancelled the Friday sitting of the committee on more than 5 occasions since September, via “Chairperson’s Directives” issued to MPs via WhatsApp. This is despite the Term’s meetings having been formally agreed to and adopted by the Committee.
This has significant consequences, as not only do journalists, members of the public and civil society organisations rely on adopted Committee Programmes, which are then printed in the weekly Parliamentary Z-List (formal notice of committee sittings), but it is unconscionable given the significant work the committee must get through given the crisis of South Africa’s water services.
It is clear the Chairperson is attempting to protect the Department’s failings and is shielding officials from being held to account. The DA will not stand for this as it is outrageous and undermines the very purpose of Parliament.