DA to appeal Nuclear Deal secrecy
2 December 2014
Today the DA received a legal opinion giving us adequate legal standing to submit a Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) appeal against the decision to deny us access to the bi-lateral nuclear co-operation agreements between South Africa and Russia.
On 09 October, we submitted a PAIA application to the Department of Energy (DoE) to gain access to the documents. These documents must urgently be made public, as it involves information that is clearly in the public interest.
Reports suggest that the President could have already agreed to a nuclear deal with Russia amounting to as much as R1 trillion. This would be ruinous for South Africa and is obviously unaffordable. The nature of this deal, the motivations for it and the possibility of electricity price increases that come with it, makes all information relating to the deal vitally important.
On 4 November 2014, the Deputy Information Officer of the DoE responded with a refusal to our original PAIA application. We are now certain that this refusal was improper and has no basis in law. We are left to assume that our application has been refused on purely political grounds.
The main basis of our appeal will be that:
It is highly unlikely that a framework agreement, meant to facilitate negotiations, would contain technical, scientific or commercially sensitive information. Any technical or commercially sensitive information would be contained in subsequent, more detailed agreements.
The refusal suggests that the disclosure of the document "could prejudice the other party" to the agreement. This would appear to suggest that disclosure would affect some undisclosed interests of the Russian Federation. It is unclear what interests these are. In any event, there is no basis under PAIA for the DoE to limit disclosure of documents to citizens, in order to protect the commercial interests of another sovereign State.
The DA is in possession of the agreement signed between the governments of the Republic of Korea and South Africa. This agreement was signed on 8 October 2010 and on 24 February 2011 was made publicly available. This begs the question that, if the agreements signed by South Africa and Korea are public information, why the Russian deal is being kept secret?
Reports today have revealed that Treasury has not explored the cost of the nuclear plants as proposed by the DoE. This latest development inspires no confidence that any procurement process would comply with the constitutional principles of fair, cost effective and competitive bidding that limits vendor countries from having undue influence on the final decision.
The DA will continue to use all means at our disposal to prevent the South African public from being railroaded into a deal that could have dire long-term impacts on our economy. Our nation's financial sustainability is not to be politicised as any negative impacts will impact us all.
The DoE must once and for all come clean with the South African public on any feasibility or financial impact studies that have been undertaken. All documents or draft documents must be revealed so that we can deliberate on whether nuclear is in fact the best solution to our current energy conundrum.
Statement issued by Lance Greyling MP, DA Shadow Minister of Energy, December 2 2014
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