The public lecture takes place when we celebrate 20 years of the democratic Parliament. Hence the theme 20 Years of a Democratic Parliament.

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1 Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP), Hon Mninwa Johannes Mahlangu, on the Occasion of the NCOP Public Lecture Under the Theme 20 Years of a Democratic Parliament at the University of Fort Hare, Alice, Eastern Cape 18 Mar 2014 Programme director, Professor Reckson Thakathi, Vice-Chancellor, Dr Mvuyo Tom, Members of the Fort Hare Council and Senate, Academic staff and the community of students, Deputy Chairperson of the NCOP, Hon Thandi Memela, Acting Premier, Hon Phumullo Masualle, Delegates to the NCOP and Members of the Eastern Cape Provincial Legislature, The Mayor of Nkonkobe Local Municipality, Leaders of internal and external formations, Distinguished guests. I am honoured to present the second public lecture of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP). I thank Dr Tom and the University for affording us this opportunity. The public lecture takes place when we celebrate 20 years of the democratic Parliament. Hence the theme 20 Years of a Democratic Parliament. Generally we underestimate the achievements we have made since Yet there are many outsiders who admire how we are evolving as a society. To illustrate this, last month we hosted the President of the Norwegian Parliament, Mr Olemic Thommessen. He observed that despite having 200 years of parliamentary democracy they were learning from the 20 years of South Africa s parliamentary democracy. As a result, they will be sending a team to learn more about our parliamentary structures. Programme director, we decided to approach the University of Fort Hare for this public lecture for a number of reasons. These include the fact that the university is redefining its role as the producer and disseminator of new knowledge. It is seeking to reshape post-apartheid South Africa. Also, we wanted to pay homage to this institution given its role in the liberation of South Africa and its continued contribution to transformation. In presenting this lecture, I will give a brief exposition of the genesis of our Parliament and its contribution to transformation. Thereafter, I will focus on the specific role and contribution of the NCOP before raising some of the current and future transformational tasks. To describe Parliament I will borrow from one of the former students of this institution, the late Oliver Reginald Tambo, when he talked about popular organ of people s power. Parliament consists of representatives who are elected to represent the voice of the people. It is a national tribune for the public consideration of issues. Our Constitution recognises that in its representative processes Parliament must promote public involvement. This makes our democracy both representative and participatory.

2 The establishment of our first democratically elected Parliament in 1994 occurred under the country's first non-racial Constitution (the 1993 Interim Constitution). The result was a bicameral Parliament made up of the National Assembly (NA) and the Senate. Informed by the will of the people, we moved from the system of parliamentary supremacy to one where Parliament is based on the supremacy of the Constitution. It is a system where both substance and processes of Parliament are subject to public scrutiny. In the 20 years of existence, our Parliament has made significant and bold strides in leading the transformation of society. The repeal of apartheid legislation and the introduction of transformational legislation was the focus of Parliament in the first decade of democracy. Significant interventions included: 1) Development of the Constitution as a basis for our democracy 2) Entrenching multiparty democracy 3) Creation of institutions that support democracy (for example, the offices of the Public Protector and the Auditor-General) 4) Legislation to promote reconciliation, unity and nation building 5) Legislation to transform the education system 6) Legislation to advance the interests of workers 7) Promotion of gender equality 8) Spearheading debate and legislation to improve the health of our people We ensured transparency by implementing the constitutional provision that all the proceedings of Parliament, including committee meetings, should be conducted in an open manner except where there were justifiable reasons to do otherwise. After a decade of focusing on transformation, in 2004 Parliament started extending its tentacles to other significant work. With the tapering down of the legislative workload and the increased challenge to ensure sound governance and effective service delivery by the executive, the imperative arose to improve Parliament s oversight capacity. To this end, the third and fourth parliaments played a significant role which resulted in the development of an Oversight and Accountability Model and the development of legislation to provide for a procedure to amend money Bills. The amendment of money Bills is one of the constitutional responsibilities of Parliament. Flowing from the introduction of the Money Bills Act, last year we launched Parliament s Budget Office to enhance Parliament s oversight role by specialising in providing high-quality research and analysis of fiscal policy for parliamentary committees. Going forward, we believe that this will assist Parliament significantly in what we call fiscal oversight. In order to entrench the notion of separation of powers between the three arms of the state (that is the legislature or Parliament, the executive and the judiciary), we initiated the Finance Management of Parliament Act which came into effect in The Act allows Parliament to have an appropriate regime for the management of its finances and accounting thereof. We are currently discussing

3 with other arms of the state about other means of enhancing this system of checks and balances. Informed by the vision we crafted in 2005, we began a process to build an effective people s Parliament that is responsive to the needs of the people and that is driven by the ideal of realising a better quality of life for all the people of South Africa. We did so in order to make Parliament a popular organ of people s power. We sought to achieve this by, among other things, providing public participation platforms. However, we have observed that we need to promote knowledge of the institution and its processes among the people, as well as ensure that there is serious action to respond to the issues raised by the people in public platforms. This will increase the legitimacy of Parliament. Over the years, public participation was implemented without common guidelines. The fourth Parliament developed the Public Participation Framework for Parliament and Provincial Legislatures. The goal of the new Public Participation Framework is to provide a written guideline that contains integration opportunities and minimum norms and standards for public participation within the legislative sector so as to improve alignment and practice of public participation. Parliament and each of the Provincial Legislatures are expected to develop their own models in line with this framework. In addition, we have initiated a pilot programme in some Provinces of Parliamentary Democracy Offices, they assist with realising the public participation objectives of Parliament. They create an immediate parliamentary presence in the provinces, and ensure a greater level of efficiency in accessing communities and providing ground support for parliamentary programmes. The fifth Parliament must assess the strategic value of this form of intervention to further bring Parliament closer to the people. Programme director, our future people s Parliament needs to be a highly networked and thus highly intelligent institution. It must be a true and popular organ of people s power that contributes immensely to strengthening democratic practice. Therefore, there needs to be a dynamic link between Parliament and the people. Such a link will assist in gathering intelligence and knowledge about the impact of the decisions that are taken on behalf of the people. For instance, one critical aspect of our work that we need to improve is the ability to assess the impact of the laws on the lives of the people. In 2006 Parliament conducted a desktop review of the impact of the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act of The review concentrated on the impact of the Equality Act on the lives of women and people with disabilities. Among many things revealed by this study, was that while we may have produced good laws our people were not benefitting maximally from these due to challenges in implementation. A case in point was the poor treatment of victims of domestic violence when they report cases in some of our police stations.

4 In general, Parliament needs to improve its monitoring and evaluation capacity. Our systems and processes must be in line with our oversight and public participation models so that public participation inputs received are correctly channelled and utilised by the committees in their oversight and legislative work. As a representative of the people of South Africa, Parliament finds itself in a fastchanging global domain. Political and economic relations and co-operation are furthered on global, continental and regional platforms. Guided by South Africa s foreign policy, we have actively participated in various regional, continental and international forums to promote the African agenda and the role South Africa plays in this regard. We have also sought to build strong people-to-people relations to improve interaction between the people of our countries. All this work is underpinned or guided by what we call parliamentary diplomacy. In 2008, we hosted about 160 parliaments of the world through the Inter- Parliamentary Union. We used this gathering to focus the attention of world parliamentarians on pushing back the frontiers of poverty. Last year our Parliament hosted the 59 th Conference of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA). One of the broad outcomes of the 59 th CPA conference was the consideration and adoption of the Commonwealth Charter by all parliaments of the Commonwealth. This Charter seeks to strengthen the oversight mechanism of the CPA parliaments with regard to accountability, good governance, parliamentary democracy and people-centred development. However, we still need to build more capacity for monitoring the implementation of international agreements, as well as resolutions adopted at multilateral conferences. Agreements that are entered into by the executive on behalf of the Republic are ratified by Parliament, which gives us oversight responsibility over their implementation. The South African Parliament is an active Member of the Pan African Parliament (PAP), which is hosted in our country, in Midrand. PAP is the legislative wing of the African Union, a tool to break down barriers inhibiting African co-operation. As we celebrate the 10 th anniversary of the existence of the Pan African Parliament, we pay tribute to the collective efforts aimed at fostering people-centred parliamentary democracy, peace and development. Let me now turn to the NCOP which is one of the two Houses of our Parliament in order to illustrate, albeit in limited scale, our contribution to co-operative government. Through the Constitution, the NCOP, which replaced the Senate, was mandated to represent the provinces to ensure that provincial interests are taken into account in the national sphere of government. It had to do this mainly by participating in the national legislative process and by providing a national forum for public consideration of issues affecting the provinces. In addition, the House had to provide

5 for the representation of the different categories of municipalities by organised local government. It goes without saying that Chapter 3 of the Constitution, dealing with co-operative government, has significant implications for the work of the NCOP and its role in society. As the institution that straddles the three spheres of government, the NCOP is thus well placed to promote co-operation and good intergovernmental relations. This is important in order to ensure that our people are served better by an effective, transparent, accountable and coherent government. As part of contributing to the 20 years of the first democratic Parliament, the NCOP initiated and advanced programmes that enabled it to give expression to its mandate. These include: 1) The Taking Parliament to the People programme whereby the NCOP sits in the different provinces to interact with the people who otherwise would not have the means or opportunity to go to Parliament in Cape Town. Through this programme communities have been able to interact directly with their leaders from national, provincial and local government under one roof, thus creating the possibility to coordinate and thus enhance service delivery. In this programme people themselves determine the agenda and not us. Their participation in agenda-setting has created the necessary bond and trust between the NCOP and the communities we visited. 2) The Provincial Week programme whereby public representatives from the NCOP work on the ground with Members of Provincial Legislatures and Councillors. They conduct oversight and follow up on the challenges raised by the people. This joint work has helped us to understand the weaknesses and the huge potential of our intergovernmental system. These interventions by the NCOP promote co-operation in how the leaders work to resolve the problems of the people. This level of co-operation is also exhibited when we deal with the annual Division of Revenue Bill. The NCOP therefore acts as the mechanism that brings our decentralised governance system together. This is important because our Constitution provides for one, sovereign, democratic state. By acting as the link between Parliament and the provinces of South Africa, as well as municipalities, the NCOP provides opportunities for the creation of synergies between the different spheres of government. The Constitution instructs us to foster friendly relations so that we can co-operate in solving the problems of the people. Importantly, the Constitution (in section 154(1)) obliges the national and provincial governments to support and strengthen the capacity of municipalities to manage their own affairs, to exercise their powers and to perform their functions. This means that national and provincial government have the responsibility to ensure that local

6 government, which is the sphere of government that provides democratic and accountable government for local communities, is supported. For example, the local government equitable share review, which was the review of the formula for allocation of financial resources from nationally raised revenue to municipalities, has led to the implementation of a funding model that takes into account the increase in population numbers as contained in the 2011 Census Report, as well as the developmental challenges and revenue-raising ability of municipalities. This is a demonstration of how municipalities should be supported by other spheres. Through these and other interventions over the years, one can say that the NCOP: 1) has managed to shine the light on the work of government; 2) has ensured that people, from even the most rural part of the country, get the information they need and participate in the processes of Parliament; 3) has ensured that people engage directly with their local, provincial and national leaders, thus promoting public accountability; 4) has ensured that public representatives go back to the issues people raised through a follow-up programme. As such, we have contributed to South Africa becoming an open society where challenges facing the people are discussed in an open manner. Programme director, there are many issues I would have liked to raise. However, I need to stick to time. Lest you call me to order. Let me, in concluding, raise with you some of the points I would like you to consider as students of politics, public administration, law, economics, or creators of knowledge in general. My hope is that you will make the time to reflect on them now and in future. The developments that I have mentioned in this presentation are evidence that Parliament s role in our constitutional democracy is evolving. As such we need, among other things, to take into account the following: 1) Shifts in thinking and approach regarding the position, roles and functions of Parliament. For example, we need to shift the thinking from the narrow extrapolations of the provisions of Chapter 4 of the Constitution (which deals with Parliament) to a broader appreciation and implementation of the critical role of Parliament in the fundamental objectives of nation-building, participatory democracy and the promotion and protection of a rights-based culture and respect for the rule of law 2) The increasing complexity of our policy and law-making environment requires that we always provide adequate staff, facilities and infrastructure support to Members of Parliament (MPs) to improve the quality of their work, deliberations and decisionmaking 3) Ongoing capacity-building programmes for MPs. Over the years we have assisted MPs to build their capacity through certificate courses in governance and public

7 leadership. In the fourth Parliament alone 692 MPs and MPLs enrolled for these courses, and 404 participants have now completed their studies. Plans are afoot to introduce a Masters Programme in Governance and Public Leadership in the fifth Parliament 4) Restructuring of the institution of Parliament, which has already begun, to ensure that administration is aligned and supports the strategic objectives of this people s institution as well as increase and improve operational efficiency in its task of acting as the voice of the people 5) There is a need to finalise the establishment of a sufficiently resourced, enabled, comprehensive and proactive communication machinery that helps us to bridge the gap that still exists between Parliament and the people. In this regard, we have made significant improvements in the area of information communication technology from which we can build a Parliament that is in conversation with the people all the time; and lastly 6) The role of young people in parliamentary proceedings and processes. In order to ensure that we build and sustain our democracy, Parliament must create effective platforms that are designed to capture the voice of the youth and utilise it. It goes without saying that an evolving Parliament will require an increase in specialised skills and the development of knowledge. One of the many options in this regard would be the creation of a virtual parliamentary academic environment in order to create the areas of knowledge required in the activities of Parliament. It is clear that this work will require collaboration with institutions such as the University of Fort Hare and other institutions to assist with continuous capacity-building. As institutions that trade in knowledge, you must be at the forefront in working with communities to find innovative solutions to our challenges and to share these with government. With your assistance, our people could make a great contribution in fashioning solutions so that we benefit more from the freedom we attained in On the other hand, community leaders have the task of creating platforms for the sharing of solutions that are shaped by the people. In 20 years we have made great strides in establishing and consolidating parliamentary democracy. We have made serious interventions to transform our society and to improve the status of our Parliament. We are on course towards making Parliament a popular organ of people s power. We need your support in casting our view in the future to design Parliament that presides over a modern democracy with complex policy and legislative needs. I thank you for giving us your time. We would like to see the University of Fort Hare achieve success as it journeys towards the centenary and beyond. Ke a leboga Enkosi!

8 Issued by: Parliament of South Africa