Newly elected chairperson of parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) Rise Mzansi leader Songezo Zibi plans to bring a fresh and innovative approach to the role, expanding it beyond its traditional focus on probing wasteful and irregular expenditure.
Zibi was elected to the position at a meeting of Scopa on Wednesday. The EFF’s Veronica Mente objected to his taking over the position on the grounds that Rise Mzansi is a member of the government of national unity (GNU) and therefore not qualified to take the chair. It has been a long-standing parliamentary convention that the chair of Scopa is a member of an opposition party.
ActionSA parliamentary caucus leader Athol Trollip criticised Zibi’s election for the same reason, saying that it was “bound to compromise objective and critical oversight. Strong government needs a counterbalancing force in opposition that uses the considerable powers afforded to a Scopa chairperson to hold government to account”.
In an interview with Business Day, Zibi rejected those concerns. He said Rise Mzansi did not hold any positions in the national executive and if it had done so it would not have accepted the Scopa chair. He insisted that his becoming Scopa chair was not part of the GNU deal and had been negotiated.
“I think it is important to have someone [as Scopa chair] who is not in the government executive because there is a collegiality that develops between colleagues. You don’t want to be too nasty to your colleagues who sit in cabinet or is a deputy minister,” he said.
Scopa plays a vital role in holding the executive to account. It looks for wasteful and irregular expenditure when considering the financial statements of departments and organs of state, and it is also empowered to conduct investigations.
Zibi said he wanted to use Scopa “to help fix the culture and attitudes towards the use of public funds” by the government. This would include, but not be limited to, stealing and corruption and would also focus on how public funds were deployed and whether this yielded results for the people of SA. The rationale for the expenditure would have to be interrogated as well.
Zibi wants to expand Scopa’s role to include whether an organ of state should have spent money in the first place.
I think it is important to have someone [as Scopa chair] who is not in the government executive because there is a collegiality that develops between colleagues.
“It is to help instil a sense of what a return on investment looks like,” he said. The criteria should not simply be whether the correct authorisation was obtained and all the boxes ticked, but whether the right goal was chosen and whether it was achieved.
“I have noticed over the years interacting with auditor-general reports that sometimes it might look like something was properly done but the strategic purpose for which it was done just makes no sense,” he said
The second important aim that Zibi has is to educate the public about the work of parliament and the government in general, which he said was often opaque. The third goal was to make parliament accessible to members of the public.
Another possibility for Scopa, which he would explore with the standing committee on finance, was to probe how the government was spending the mountain of debt that it has accumulated.
Build One SA leader Mmusi Maimane was elected chair of the appropriations committee. He said in an interview that SA’s fiscal sustainability had to be given appropriate oversight and the appropriations committee would play a vital role in that regard.
Maimane said he would ensure the committee performed its responsibility to provide oversight of the way the government spends public money, and hold any wrongdoers accountable.
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