Gordhan treats Parliament with disdain

5 November 2020

During the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) meeting on Wednesday,  the Minister of Public Enterprises, Pravin Gordhan, committed to providing answers to all questions regarding South African Airways (SAA) and SA Express within a week of the meeting. The Democratic Alliance (DA) has therefore submitted written questions on these State-owned airlines to the SCOPA officials for onward submission to Minister Gordhan.

We hope that Minister Gordhan intends to keep this promise as most of the questions on SAA and SA Express have been submitted to him before on 18 May 2020 and the DA is yet to receive any response from the Minister. This shows Minister Gordhan’s complete disdain for Parliament and its committees, and by extension the South African public. It is the constitutional obligation of Parliament and its committees to hold the Executive to account and Minister Gordhan cannot be allowed to act as though he is above accounting to Parliament.

The Minister’s insistence on wasting another R10.5 billion on the dead duck SAA vanity project at the expense of service delivery and the creation of jobs for the millions of unemployed South Africans is wasteful, immoral, and financially illiterate and the DA will not support this appropriation when it comes before Parliament later this year.

Issued byAlf Lees,DA Member of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, 5 November 2020