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DA: Hendrik Schmidt: Address by DA Member on Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence, during the budget vote debate on State Security, Parliament (26/04/2016)

DA: Hendrik Schmidt: Address by DA Member on Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence, during the budget vote debate on State Security, Parliament (26/04/2016)

26th April 2016

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Dear Chairperson

The Intelligence Services Oversight Act makes provision for the appointment of an Inspector General of Intelligence (IGI) to bear the trust of the public in ensuring that our security services are properly monitored. This is a role similar to that of constitutionally mandated Chapter 9 institutions.

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The DA believes that the IGI should be a retired judge who, by virtue of his service as a judge, has demonstrated independence, impartiality and fairness. The process of appointing an IGI should also be conducted in an open and transparent process.

This is not what the ANC believes nor practices. It unashamedly and deliberately (until as recently as last month) tried to manipulate the process in the Joint Standing Committee On Intelligence (JSCI) and Parliament by trying three times to ensure that a former ANC MP be appointed as IGI. To make matters worse, this candidate was also the previous chair of the JSCI and author of the ‘Secrecy Bill’, Cecil Burgess.

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The ANC unashamedly pays lip service to the notion of accountability and openness but the candidates who were nominated and shortlisted, last year were interviewed behind closed doors. As DA representatives on the JSCI, we refused to be part of this charade and did not attend any of the closed interviews which led to an ANC member being proposed to Parliament.

Ultimately the Speaker tried to apply pressure by means of a letter addressed to parliamentarians to support their ANC candidate – most likely at the insistence of President Zuma.

Despite these attempts, the ANC failed to have its ANC candidate appointed as it could not muster the two-thirds majority required in terms of the Constitution. We therefore are repeating the process of appointing the IGI.

As stated in the budget debate last year – we will not be intimidated by the ANC into appointing ANC hacks, behind closed doors to benefit the ANC and President Zuma.

This is not the only abysmal failure by the ANC government. The White Paper on Intelligence which guides the State Security Department in matters relating to intelligence, dates to 1995 – one year after the advent of democracy, whilst the Intelligence Services Oversight Act, which heralded the new intelligence dispensation, was adopted in 1994. Both these documents have not been subjected to revision despite numerous undertakings by the Department to do so amidst changing circumstances.

The Minister should confine himself to attending to the long outstanding affairs of the department rather than trying to promote the dubious and maligned objectives of the ANC and its President locally and abroad. The Minister’s disgraceful approach in attempting to prop up the ANC in the midst of the growing and deteriorating political and economic turmoil requires serious introspection.

The DA will not support a campaign to discredit NGO’s whose bona fide task it is to ensure that our hard fought constitutional democracy prevails. Nor will we support an outdated, backward and miserably failed Cold War alignment with the so-called “East block”.

One does not have to look much further than the building by North Korea (that international polecat which as recently as Saturday breached UN sanctions) of military bases and military headquarters in Namibia, the purchase by Angola of military aircraft and equipment from Russia, major Chinese investments in Zimbabwe and the recent return to rebel activities in Mozambique with the resultant impact on neighbouring Malawi due to fleeing Mozambicans, to realise that we seriously need to reconsider our National strategic positioning as a country.

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