National Council of Provinces

Now, stakeholders received these new provisions approximately four hours before a meeting and were afforded two minutes each to comment, so no further NA public participation followed.

The bill subsequently passed through the National Council of Provinces and was enacted into the Public Procurement Act and had not yet commenced.

so the premier of the western cape and amabungan center for investigation in one application the city of cape town and various others and another approached the concord they sought declarations at parliament and were applicable provincial legislatures failed to fulfill their constitutional obligations to facilitate public involvement before passing the act so um Sections 59.1a and 72.1a require the NA and the CCOP to facilitate public involvement in their legislative process.

The governing standard is reasonableness.

So hopefully within the coming months they'll finish all of that.

And then it also has to be considered by the National Council of Provinces before it becomes law.

Yeah.

We have an opportunity coming up in this country.

And that can take some time.

And then thereafter, once it has been approved in the National Assembly, then it must go to the National Council of Provinces to be adopted by them also.

But normally that is a quicker process than the one in the National Assembly.

As I said, we are at around about 60 days before the local government elections.

And what kind of message does this send, importantly, to those who sit on the JSE?

Well, I think it's a very important message, certainly for the commissioners, National Assembly and the NCOP representatives that sit on the JSC, that they are there as representatives of the institution of Parliament.

They're not there in their personal capacity and they've got to comply with that public responsibility.

It's also interesting to note, Mandy, that the JSC itself is now also reviewing its code of conduct to seek to include the ability of the JSC to refer issues of misconduct by commissioners to the...

We're in the process at the moment, actually.

That's why we've, the past two months, my colleague, Nicholas Gotzel, in the National Council of Provinces, he's been taking them on about it.

But...

So, I mean, that's just a small example where they don't actually want that help because I am convinced that somewhere someone is getting something.

Sometimes they don't know that it's actually within Parliament.

What is the Parliamentary Budget Office for those who don't know? And why does Parliament actually need economists? Because Parliament, I'm going to say for sure, there's some people when they ask me what Parliament is, they only think of MPs, the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces.

They don't actually understand that there's people who actually ensure that Parliament in its entirety functions.

So the PBO, what is the PBO? What do economists do in the PBO?

So that serves specifically four committees within both houses.

So parliament, if people don't know, has two different houses.

It's the National Assembly as well as the National Council of Provinces.

So we serve the Finance and Appropriation Committee of the two houses.

But legislative agency cannot justify a process that fails to satisfy Parliament's constitutional obligations.

And we are currently in the process of writing to the portfolio committee on Cocteau, the National Assembly and also the National Council of Provinces to demand clarity on this issue.

We are calling on Parliament to exercise oversight mandate and require the Minister to answer at least three key questions from our end.

One being, what is the proposed parliamentary timetable for public hearings? How much time will citizens have to review and comment on the bill? And can Parliament realistically meet its Section 76 constitutional obligations without Andrew Haste.