The Democratic Alliance (DA) believes that it is unacceptable that the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC) has once again failed to table its quarterly reports in Parliament.
The fact is that the NCACC has become a serial violator of the very law it is supposed to enforce.
The NCACC cannot get its act together from year-to-year to meet its statutory requirements and table quarterly reports in Parliament.
The law regulating the NCACC, the National Conventional Arms Control Committee Act (No. 41 of 2002), requires that a quarterly report on "all conventional arms exports concluded during the preceding quarter" be tabled in Parliament.
Newly appointed NCACC chairperson Jeff Radebe made an undertaking to the Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans last year that the committee would meet all its statutory reporting requirements including tabling quarterly and annual reports in Parliament.
But this has not happened.
The NCACC has once again failed to table a quarterly report for the period between:
- 1 April 2009 - 30 June 2009 (Second Quarter);
- 1 July 2009 - 30 September 2009 (Third Quarter); and
- 1 October 2009 - 31 December 2009 (Fourth Quarter).
This problem is not new.
The Auditor-General's 2008/2009 annual report notes that:
"Section 23 (1) (b) of the Act requires that the NCACC should submit quarterly reports to the Cabinet and a committee of Parliament. For the period under review no such quarterly reports were submitted. The Directorate of Conventional Arms Control (DCAC) only submitted an annual report to Parliament which contained the information for all quarters".
This provides more evidence of what appears to be an almost permanent administrative meltdown at the NCACC.
The NCACC quarterly reports are imperative to keep track of possible "dodgy arms deals" including most importantly whether the deal to sell thousands of sniper rifles to Syria and millions of rounds of ammunition to Zimbabwe was approved.
The NCACC has become a "ball-and-chain" for both government and business: it is bad for government because of the risk of dodgy arms deals falling through the cracks and it is bad for business because backlogs in evaluating permits stop business in its tracks.
That is why the NCACC needs be re-engineered - fast.
The DA will therefore call on Nyami Booi, Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans, to schedule a meeting with Jeff Radebe, Chairperson of the NCACC, to brief the Portfolio Committee on Defence and Military Veterans on:
- the import and export of conventional arms for the period between 1 April 2009 and 31 December 2009; and
- what steps are being taken to strengthen the administrative capacity of the NCACC.
Statement issued by David Maynier, MP, Democratic Alliance shadow minister of defence and military veterans, January 26 2010
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