BUSANI NGCAWENI | DA complaint about officials’ attendance of party study groups is misplaced

The DA’s decision to deliver a dossier to the Public Service Commission (PSC) concerning officials who attended ANC parliamentary study group briefings is procedurally misdirected and substantially thin.

The complaint misidentifies the responsible parties and ignores the institutional mechanisms available to address the practice.

It only serves to consume scarce public resources in pursuit of officials who exercised no meaningful autonomous choice. Three grounds support this assertion.

Officials follow instructions

The DA’s complaint proceeds as though senior officials independently sought access to ANC study groups, an inference that is simply incorrect.

Parliamentary study groups are convened by political parties; they do not issue standing invitations to the administration.

It is the ministers and deputy ministers who attend such sessions. Ministers and their deputies take advisers and officials with them.

Neither ministry staff nor departmental officials possess a standing invitation themselves, nor would any reasonable reading of the public service’s accountability architecture suggest otherwise.

The National Assembly has standing committees, a rules committee and presiding officers whose mandate includes governing parliamentary conduct

Even when study groups specifically want officials to attend, they do not send direct invitations. It is the political principals who facilitate participation.

The consequences of this institutional and procedural reality are significant. An official accompanying a minister to a parliamentary engagement is not exercising a discretionary political preference; the official is discharging a duty of service to the political principal.

To expect senior officials to refuse a minister’s request or instruction to attend a briefing with members of parliament would be to demand conduct that itself violates official obligations. The PSC cannot reasonably investigate officials for meeting duly elected members of parliament.

It is also worth noting the operational dimension. Senior officials are, in practice, required to present the same material across many forums: executive management meetings where presentations to portfolio committees are considered, ministerial briefings, study group sessions and, ultimately, portfolio committee sessions.

Far from enjoying a covert political arrangement, many officials regard these many iterations as an administrative burden (in some instances deputy ministers are briefed separately, adding a fifth meeting where the director-general (DG) goes through the same content).

The DA’s characterisation of routine inter-institutional briefings as clandestine conduct is not supported by the facts of public administration. These meetings have been known for decades, and officials do not enjoy them.

Parliament has the power to fix the problem

If the practice of parliamentary study groups soliciting departmental briefings constitutes an improper use of legislative privilege, then it is parliament that bears the primary responsibility for addressing it through its own rules, structures and conventions.

The National Assembly has standing committees, a rules committee and presiding officers whose mandate includes governing parliamentary conduct.

The DA, it should be noted, is not without influence in that august institution. The party holds the position of deputy speaker of the National Assembly and thus serves as a presiding officer with direct authority over parliamentary procedure.

If the use of study groups to obtain advance departmental briefings represents an abuse of parliamentary process, the appropriate institutional response is a rules amendment or a direct intervention by the presiding officers, not a referral to an executive oversight body whose mandate does not naturally extend to conduct initiated within the legislature.

This point has broader application. Parliamentary questions have long been used by opposition parties, sometimes excessively, to obtain departmental information to support political party or individual research objectives.

The practice of officials attending parliamentary study group briefings is not without institutional complications, and a principled case can be made for its reform

Senior officials have dutifully prepared detailed written replies to such questions, signed by the relevant minister and tabled before the House.

If the systematic use of parliamentary questions to gather information constitutes an analogous practice, as the logic of the DA’s complaint implies, then the appropriate remedy for all such practices lies in parliamentary reform, not in investigations of the officials who responded to seemingly legitimate requests.

Some ministers have complained about the relevance and substance of some questions, let alone the apparent abuse of portfolio committees to run political campaigns against rivals.

It is well known in some departments that some committee members contact “insiders” in departments to share specific information that weakens ministers, their deputies and DGs when they appear before committees. The PSC cannot change this; the legislature can.

Role of the cabinet

The DA’s decision to approach the PSC is particularly difficult to justify in the context of the current political configuration. The party is a full member of the government of national unity (GNU) and holds significant cabinet portfolios.

Its ministers sit in cabinet alongside their ANC counterparts and other party leaders who previously occupied opposition benches. Through the cabinet, they have standing meetings with the president and his deputy, who is also the leader of government business in parliament.

If the DA believes parliamentary study group briefings are undermining the authority of its ministers or creating information asymmetries that compromise the integrity of portfolio committee proceedings, the appropriate first step is to engage at the cabinet level.

This is precisely the kind of inter-party governance issue the GNU’s mechanism can manage. A complaint to the PSC, which is an oversight body constitutionally positioned to evaluate the conduct of the public administration rather than to arbitrate between coalition partners, is not the correct forum.

The practice of officials attending parliamentary study group briefings is not without institutional complications, and a principled case can be made for its reform.

However, reform must proceed from a factual and substantive diagnosis. The officials identified in the DA’s dossier did not act unilaterally, did not breach any statutory duty and could not, in most circumstances, have declined to attend.

Directing a PSC investigation at them conflates problems of inter-branch relations with individual misconduct and would impose accountability on those least positioned to have altered the outcome.

The DA has access to appropriate remedies: it can raise the matter in cabinet, pursue parliamentary rules reform through appropriate channels there or engage the president directly through established GNU protocols.

These channels exist precisely for misapprehensions of this nature. Using them would demonstrate a commitment to institutional governance rather than to the politics of complaint.

• Ngcaweni is a former civil servant who attended several inconsequential study group meetings