Student Number : 9908223M -
PhD thesis -
School of Social Sciences -
Faculty of Humanities / This thesis examines the status and role of parliamentary committees in democratic
theory with a view to critically assessing the performance of one such committee, the
South African version of the PAC, SCOPA. It advances a pluralist theory of popular
sovereignty according to which there is no single institutional complex or site, which
exclusively expresses the will of the people. The latter is the case in monist theories,
which reduce democracy to its practice in a single site. Rousseau and Weber are critically
examined in this connection. In the pluralist notion advanced in this thesis the popular
will is expressed and realized in a plurality of institutional sites and modalities of
exercise. On this perspective parliamentary committees perform a function vital to the
constitution of popular sovereignty itself. They are indispensable to the formation by the
people of an accurate perception by it of what the Executive is doing in its name. Their
investigative work is thus constitutive of the formation of a democratic subject and will.
Parliamentary committees are thus central to the satisfaction of the conditions of the
deliberative dimension of democracy. On this definition, parliamentary committees must
in addition themselves conform to the principles of deliberation in their own practice.
This specifically deliberative conception of democracy is then further delineated by
distinguishing it from the aggregation – majoritarian perspective and defending it against
a variety of criticisms, including that of Chantal Mouffe.
With this conceptual and normative framework in place, the British and American
committee systems are examined in order to establish some reference points in terms of
the institutional practice of parliamentary committees. The focus then shifts to the
parliamentary committees of the South African Parliament. The constitutional and legal
foundation for parliamentary committees (in the South African system) is examined with
particular reference to SCOPA itself and the first five years of the new parliamentary
committee system identified as a period during which several South African
parliamentary committees, including SCOPA, effectively exercised their “oversight”
function. Once the Government’s SDP entered the scene all things changed. This thesis
examines the formation of the JIT, paying particular attention to the exclusion of the
HSIU and the interventions of the Speaker, Hon Frene Ginwala. It identifies in close detail all the flaws in the SDP procurement process as well as the contradictions and
lacunae in the final JIT Report itself. These are of such a magnitude as to render
unreasonable any claim to the contrary and in endorsing the Report SCOPA thus clearly
failed in its essential function. The notion of a threshold concept of reasonable adequacy
is introduced as limiting the conditions under which committee decisions can legitimately
be taken via majority voting. The argument is advanced that these were clearly not met in
the case of the SCOPA decision under discussion. The implications of this “collapse” of
SCOPA for South African democracy more broadly are then identified and discussed in
terms of deliberative democratic theory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/2197 |
| Date | 02 March 2007 |
| Creators | Obiyo, Robert Egwim |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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