DA challenges President Zuma to make Nkandla SIU report public
26 August 2014
Later today I will write to President Jacob Zuma challenging him to make public the Special Investigating Unit's (SIU) final report on the upgrades to his private residence at Nkandla, delivered to him on 20 August 2014.
Neither Parliament nor the public has seen a copy of this report, or its provisional version, in its entirety. In fact, only the President himself has been handed this final report. This is in keeping with the SIU's claim that it is under no obligation to make this report public.
This only serves to further the veil of secrecy around the Nkandla investigations, rather than to open the true facts to the public.
There is, in the ordinary course, a fine line between the independent operation of the SIU, and potential compromise of that independence through the influence that the President exerts over it. This influence includes, that:
The President himself determines the scope of the investigations of the SIU;
The SIU, by law, reports directly to the President; and
The President solely decides how to act on their reports.
In this matter, where the investigation centres on the President's own private residence, and public funds spent on that residence, the inescapable conclusion must be that to withhold releasing the report means that there is something in the report for the President to conceal from the nation.
My call to the President is therefore that he must make the SIU's final report on Nkandla public and table it in Parliament for consideration by the recently established Nkandla Ad Hoc Committee.
I will include in my letter to the President that the report must be tabled before the first meeting of the Nkandla Ad Hoc Committee, and must be considered by this committee. Any other outcome will undermine the work of the Ad Hoc Committee.
The people of South Africa deserve answers on how hundreds of millions of Rands of their money was spent on President Zuma's private home.
The President must stop avoiding accountability on the massive personal benefits which accrued to him at Nkandla, and must make the SIU Report public.
Statement issued by James Selfe MP, Chairperson of the DA's Federal Executive, August 26 2014
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