The ANC voted down a DA motion to establish an ad hoc parliamentary committee to investigate the Phala Phala game farm saga, which involved the stash of over $500,000 in cash in a sofa.
Most opposition parties — EFF, IFP, FF+, ACDP, UDM and ATM — voted in favour of the motion proposed by DA chief whip Siviwe Gwarube in the National Assembly held in the Cape Town city hall on Wednesday night. However, their votes were insufficient to beat the ANC. The outcome of the manual vote, in which each MP declared his/her vote when their name was called out, was 204 against vs 135 in favour.
Gwarube’s motion noted that despite all the other investigations that have taken place or are still under way into the saga at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Limpopo game farm, “there still exists an urgent need for the Assembly to conduct — in line with its constitutional obligations to maintain oversight of and to ensure that all organs of state are accountable to it — its own inquiry into the alleged involvement of several government departments and entities in the alleged cover-up”.
She said the theft of the money and the subsequent cover-up involved several government departments and entities including the National Treasury, Sars, the State Security Agency (SSA) and SAPS among others.
In his declaration on the motion, DA leader John Steenhuisen said that only an ad hoc committee of parliament with the power to subpoena witnesses and documents could get to the bottom of how the dollars entered the country, why the theft was not properly reported and why the presidential protection unit was unlawfully used to recover the money.
EFF chief whip Floyd Shivambu noted that the use of foreign currency for transactions in SA — in this case ostensibly to buy buffaloes from Ramaphosa’s game farm — was a violation of the country’s laws and constitution. An ad hoc committee which could call Ramaphosa to give evidence was necessary, he said.
FF+ MP Wouter Wessels argued that if the ANC believed in the innocence of Ramaphosa, it should support the establishment of an ad hoc committee to get to the bottom of the matter. The ANC in parliament had failed to act during the years of state capture and was acting in the interests of the party and not the country. The ANC voted against instituting a parliamentary inquiry as proposed by the independent expert panel set up to inquire into the matter.
GOOD MP Brett Herron was against the DA motion, saying there were other investigations into Phala Phala that had not been completed yet.
The ANC said the DA proposed the motion with a predetermined objective of finding Ramaphosa guilty. It ignored the findings of the preliminary report of acting public protector Kholeka Gcaleka, which exonerated the president of wrongdoing. There were also other investigations under way, including by the Hawks.
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