EDITORIAL: How parliamentary accountability is meant to work

Perhaps we should send SA’s 400 parliamentarians to the House of Commons to see first-hand how parliamentary accountability is meant to work.

While there’s nothing magnificent about Boris Johnson these days — even his hair has lost its spring — the savaging the British prime minister received from MPs this week was something to behold. The catalyst was the devastating "partygate" report by senior civil servant Sue Gray.

It’s not as if our crack MPs would be missed much here if they took a sojourn to the UK. Not only do we no longer have an actual parliamentary building, but our diligent civil servants haven’t done much, if anything, to chase up 70 rather crucial questions put to government ministers last year that they failed to answer.

You’d think at least one of them, "What was the real reason for the uprising in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng in July 2021?", put to minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele, would have generated heated debate. But he has been allowed to get away with indifferent silence.

And, thanks to rule 135 of the National Assembly, the question has lapsed anyway. Oversight? What is that?