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Opinionista

A president accountable to none

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Mmusi Maimane is leader of Build One SA.

The need for ministers and the president to account to Parliament is not imagined, nor is it optional; it is a constitutional imperative, which must be respected and complied with. Accountability ensures that the Executive does as it says, and when it does not, it is held liable. It also ensures that the Executive’s power and authority is not abused. For without Parliament, to whom should the president ever answer?

On Thursday, the National Assembly sat for the last time this year, with President Jacob Zuma failing to account to Parliament. Despite the numerous calls from the Democratic Alliance for him to do so, we had to write to the Speaker to officially register the President’s dereliction of duty.

I do not think the seriousness of this has been fully felt by South Africa.

The Constitution is the highest law of the land. It regulates the relationship between the State, organs of the State and citizens. It is the blueprint which is used to map out how the State functions in helping to make sure our constitutional democracy works. For the president to ignore the rules is an impeachable offence, which must be viewed in a serious light.

The president is elected by and is accountable to Parliament and that relationship is regulated by both the Constitution and the Rules of the National Assembly. There is no contradiction in what both say; the president must account to Parliament.

Section 55 of the Constitution with Rule 111 of the National Assembly states that the president must appear before Parliament to answer questions at least once every parliamentary term. The president has not done so.

President Zuma has therefore broken the rules. He is today a president in violation of Parliament. And worse, he refuses to even apologise.

The excuse of the ANC is that the “climate” is not conducive to the president appearing before the House. But this is irrelevant, because the Constitution and the Rules make no reference to the circumstance under which the president must account to the House. The Rules do not say that the president shall only come when everyone in Parliament is willing to go easy on him.

So the ANC, without any legal authority to do so, has now taken a decision to ‘suspend’ the President’s parliamentary and constitutional duties. No matter how one looks at this, it is deeply worrying and it is an assault on South Africa’s constitutional democracy.

President Zuma and the ANC are being allowed to get away with murder, in the political sense.

This is all in an attempt to protect President Zuma from scrutiny in a public forum. The questions he has to answer are hard ones, and the answers will expose the litany of lies and embarrassments to which he has subjected South Africa.

South Africa demands answers on how he let Nkandla pop up under his nose, how he bungled the inquiry in the Prosecution Service head, how the Russian Nuclear Deal came to be, how corruption is a “Western Paradigm” and most importantly how he will make good on R246 million of our money in his private home.

Parliament’s doors may have closed for the year, but next year is another year in which we will fight, with even more gusto, to ensure that President Zuma answers and accounts for his plethora of scandals. DM

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