EPSTEIN NJOKWENI: The case for a portfolio committee on the presidency

Parliamentary committees play an important role in holding the executive to account. Most significantly, they are regarded as the “engine of the House”, and are at the centre of parliamentary oversight. Across democracies, they are an enduring feature of parliamentary life. 

As that doyen of American presidentialism Woodrow Wilson cleverly put it, “Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, while Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work.”

In addition to committee scrutiny, other mechanisms are used to hold the executive or government to account. Conventionally, government departments are subjected to a range of classical oversight tools such as direct questions, interpellations, debates and committees’ scrutiny. At least at this level of oversight, scrutiny is intense and multifaceted.

However, unlike government departments the SA presidency is not subjected to systematic, structured and continuous scrutiny. Notably, the president hardly ever appears before any committee, and is instead able to defer the broader task of accountability to different line ministries.

The only form of direct oversight occurs in the plenary during sittings of parliament where the president is questioned on a broad range of issue. More often than not these are not aimed at ensuring meaningful accountability but focus on optics and “oppositionism” for the benefit of television cameras.

Under the media spotlight opposition parties have to be seen to be holding the executive to account. Thus, questioning in house sittings is for wider participation, is less focused and at times borders on simply aiming to gain media and political mileage rather than intensely interrogating the performance of the Office of the Presidency.

On the other hand, committee scrutiny complements house sittings and allows for more focused and specialised level of scrutiny where committee members interrogate the detail of performance.

Recent calls for the formation of a portfolio committee to oversee the Office of the Presidency are therefore not without merit, nor are they unprecedented. Notwithstanding the source of the call, there are compelling merits for such a committee given the fact that Office of the President is allocated resources in terms of the Public Finance Management Act, and that parliament has to vote and theoretically approve its allocation. In principle all votes, including the one for the presidency, need to account for their financial and non-financial performance across the budgetary cycle.

In terms of precedence, a number of provincial legislatures have arrangements requiring their respective premiers to account to specialised standing committees. For example, at the Gauteng legislature there is an interesting institutional innovation that obliges the premier to report to a dedicated committee in the form of the Oversight Committee on the Premier’s Office and the Legislature to account for its quarterly and annual performance.

This committee has been in existence for over 20 years, and is an institution that is an integral part of the broader committee system with far reaching oversight responsibilities regarding the Office of the Premier. As in other portfolio committees, the premier’s accountability to the legislature is structured and systematic.

Other jurisdictions also have, to varying degrees and forms, well established committee practices overseeing heads of states. In the Welsh Assembly the first minister accounts to the committee of the first minister. In the Scottish parliament the first minister accounts to the convenors committee. In the British House of Commons there have been attempts to systematically hold the prime minister to account through the liaison committee.

However, one of notable criticism of this committee is that it is entirely ill suited to effectively oversee the prime minister due to its generic nature and that a large part of its oversight activities are focused on other issues. There have been calls for an entirely different parliamentary body/committee to carry out this function. The latter criticism puts into particular relief the need for a committee that is narrowly focused on the head of state, in our instance the Office of the Presidency.

Such a committee should aim to ensure transparency on how the Office of the President justifies its budgetary allocation across various programmes in areas such as human resources and consulting services. In other words, different administrative programmes should account to a parliamentary portfolio committee on their performance against their expressed strategic and annual performance plans. Principles of answerability and accountability apply to the president in terms of the convention of ministerial accountability. 

The president is accountable for his actions and has to provide detailed information on his area of responsibility, but an all-important question is where this leaves the director-general of the presidency in the accountability chain. Well-established practice requires this individual to account for spending on the operations of the organisation of the presidency. Thus, as accounting officers they have to report to the relevant portfolio and standing committees of parliament such as the Public Accounts Committee (Scopa) and a specific committee tasked with overseeing the office of the president. Therefore, the logic of oversight or vertical accountability applies to the administration of the presidency. 

Other than the ex-post conventional audits conducted by the auditor-general, other performance aspects of the presidency are and remain a “black box”, and how they perform at programmatic level is not wholly transparent. Portfolio committees are well suited to untangling the “black box” of government performance. As the two Rhodes academics Ian Sieborger and Ralph Andendorff elegantly put it in their paper “Black boxing and the politics of oversight in SA, “when a participant in a committee meeting questions a presentation or report, she/he is effectively opening a black box in a way which may result in a change in others’ perception of the status of the information in the black box”. Thus, parliamentary portfolio committee oversight will aid in opening up the “black box” of performance and accountability of the Office of the Presidency. 

Given this logic of oversight, the administration of the Office of the Presidency should not be insulated from parliamentary committee oversight. Also, the logic of democratic accountability implies that every taxpayer rand allocated to every vote should be accounted for in terms of outputs and outcomes. As such, committee oversight is correctly conceived as the bedrock and base that checks against underperformance or perhaps inflation of performance. 

Against this background, the Zondo state capture commission made a clear recommendation for the establishment of a committee to oversee the presidency. Moreover, the need for this committee was amplified during the debate on the presidential vote’s budget. Against these strident calls parliament under the leadership of the speaker has a moral and historical obligation to initiate the process of establishing such a committee. 

As for its design and composition, it can be different from other portfolio and standing committees, and perhaps assume a form where its members are drawn from the chairs of different portfolio and standing committees. It should certainly compel the president and his administrative team to regularly appear before the Public Accounts Committee to account for the financial performance of various programme within the Office of the Presidency. Alternatively, it could be configured it to suit the current institutional context of governance. 

• Njokweni is a consultant in governance and parliamentary oversight.