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Today, the DA’s two representatives on the Portfolio Committee for Women, Children, Youth and People with Disabilities, Denise Robinson MP and Patty Duncan MP, walked out of a scheduled briefing by the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) on a series of its quarterly reports. We did so on the grounds that the Agency is a public entity reporting to the Presidency, and therefore cannot report to the Women, Children, Youth and Disabilities portfolio committee. The fact that NYDA 'reports' to a committee that has no statutory authority to hold it to account – a committee that does not decide on appointments to the NYDA, on its budgets, or on any other matter that would give it meaningful powers of oversight – is a poignant illustration of exactly why our parliamentary system has fallen into disrepute, and allowed public money to be squandered on events such as the R100 million totalitarian youth festival organized by the NYDA at the end of last year.

The fact of the matter is that the National Youth Development Agency, and other entities falling within the ambit of the Presidency, should be overseen by a dedicated presidential portfolio committee. That one does not yet exist is something beyond our control – we proposed it, the ANC has thus far blocked it. We will not, however, give credence to the idea that actual oversight is going on today. It is not. The Women, Children, Youth and Disabilities committee can listen all they like to the NYDA, but they cannot hold the NYDA to account. Only a presidential portfolio committee would be able to do that.

We need to ensure that each public entity is held accountable by the portfolio committee that corresponds to the ministry to which it reports. In the absence of this, Parliament’s constitutionally mandated role of conducting executive oversight is curtailed. If this administration was as committed to accountability and transparency as it purports to be, it would wholeheartedly support the establishment of a presidential portfolio committee to ensure that the Presidency, and those public entities reporting to it, are subject to the same degree of oversight as all other government departments.

Today’s situation highlights the urgent need for the establishment of such an oversight body. The Presidency and its function forms a significant part of the work of the national government as a whole given its transversal responsibilities and, in order that it exercise the vast power vested in it in an open and transparent manner, it is necessary that it account to the legislature in the same fashion every other national department is required to. The Presidency should not be exempt from this principle; indeed, it should epitomise it, and the President and the two ministers in the Presidency have a duty to lead in this regard.

Like any other national department, the Presidency and those ministries that fall under it are required to go through a budgetary process, formulate and implement a strategic plan and then carry out their business in an open and transparent manner. The Constitution recognises that parliamentary committees are the best mechanism through which to achieve these ends. The same principles that apply to other government departments should be applied to the Presidency as a matter of the utmost priority.