OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS FOR ORAL REPLY
11 March 2015
The Office of the ANC Chief Whip wishes to make the following factual clarifications, which have been deliberately ignored by certain opposition parties during debate on the matter of outstanding question from last year. The President is appearing today as part of the scheduled program of Parliament in line with the rules, which stipulate that the President shall appear before the House to respond to questions four times a year. The dates for the President's appearance for reply to oral questions have already been scheduled and made public.
The President will today respond to the six questions, which have been agreed to by all parties in the National Assembly Programming Committee (NAPC) and published on the parliamentary question paper. Four supplementary (follow-up) questions would be allowed for each of the six questions appearing on the question paper.
This brings to total 30 the number of questions the President has to deal with per each (question for oral reply) session, and to 120 the number of oral questions he has to respond to per annum. This number excludes questions for written reply he regularly receives from MPs throughout the year, and other accounting mechanisms the President fulfills throughout the year, such as State of the Nation Address (SONA), SONA debate, Presidency Budget Vote, NCOP annual address and debate as well as Deputy President and executive members' individual accounting to Parliament.
There has been a speculation regarding the outstanding questions from the last session in August 2014 which was disrupted by the EFF, denying the President a valuable opportunity to address the nation on those questions. Firstly, in terms of the rules of the National Assembly, all the outstanding questions from the disrupted session in August expired when the annual session came to an end in December 2014. The rules provide that, in an event that questions could not be completed by the executive, they may be responded to in writing. This, however, does not include oral questions that have expired. In terms of the rules, "questions to the President do not stand over".
If the parties, whose questions were not responded to and have subsequently expired, still want those questions to be replied to, the rules do provide that they may be resuscitated. As matters stand, those outstanding questions are not part of the six questions due for reply this afternoon.
This means that those parties missed an opportunity to revive them for inclusion in the question paper. Each party is allocated certain slots on the question paper and it is solely up to them to choose which questions should be published on the paper for response from the President. However, the parties still have an opportunity to raise those questions during today's session as supplementary (follow-up) questions, if they substantially relate to the questions appearing on the question paper.
It ought to be emphasized, nevertheless, that despite the President having been denied an opportunity to account to the nation on August 2014 by the deliberate disruption, and despite the outstanding questions having expired, he took an initiative to comprehensively respond to every question in writing. He did this even though he was not under an obligation to do so. The President takes accountability to Parliament and the nation seriously; hence he refused to allow the shameless disruption by the EFF to prevent his constitutional obligation.
We agree with the view by most parties in Parliament today that the issue of outstanding questions from August 2014 be subjected to a thorough discussion and decision in the programming committee on Thursday, 12 March 2015.
Statement issued by the Office of the ANC Chief Whip, March 11 2015
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