Political Parties and Their Capacity to Provide Parliamentary Oversight

Abstract

Despite ushering in new innovations, such as the principle of constitutional supremacy and Chapter 9 institutions, South Africa’s constitutional democracy is still anchored in the traditional Lockean idea of separation of powers. The principle of separation of powers simultaneously allocates distinct powers to each arm of government – the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature – and allows each arm to exercise some form of oversight over the other arms. Of the three arms of government, the executive is potentially the most dangerous to citizens. This branch of government has enormous public power: it is in charge of the coercive resources of the state, such as the police and the military, and has wide powers to devise and implement policies, to enforce the law, to raise government revenue, and to spend public funds. To ensure that these powers are exercised fairly and properly, suitable and effective accountability and oversight mechanisms must be put in place. Parliamentary oversight is one such important mechanism. In the South African context, the legislature is in a unique position to hold the executive accountable. Firstly, the legislature elects the president, who in turn forms the government. In a way, then, the legislature has more democratic legitimacy than the executive. Secondly, and related to the first point, the legislature passes the laws that the executive is expected to implement. This creates a relationship of accountability. Parliamentary oversight and accountability help to ensure that the executive implements the law according to the legislature’s intent and the dictates of the Constitution. Through this oversight and accountability relationship, the legislature is able to keep control of the laws that it passes, to promote the constitutional values of accountability and good governance, and to draw on the experience of law implementation for future law-making. Therefore, oversight and accountability form part of the central tenets of our democracy. This chapter summarises the formal structure of the parliamentary oversight system and critically reviews how this structure has functioned in the context of a one-party dominated parliament. In particular, we use the Constitutional Court judgment in Economic Freedom Fighters and Democratic Alliance v Speaker of the National Assembly and Others (Nkandla case) to tease out some of the challenges that the proportional representation (PR) electoral system presents for effective parliamentary oversight. Although the notion of parliamentary oversight has application at all three levels of government, this chapter focuses largely on the national level.