DA’s Steenhuisen says Parliament not ready for independent candidates to participate in House
Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen believes Parliament is unprepared for independent candidates to take up seats in the National Assembly after next year’s national and provincial elections, which they will be able to contest for the first time since democracy.
On Monday, the Constitutional Court handed down two key judgments that confirmed the process to be followed in the allocation of seats in the 400-member House.
Delivering his party’s annual review of the performance of Parliament on Tuesday, Steenhuisen said he didn’t believe the legislature had considered the impact of independent candidates’ participation in the business of the House.
Independent candidates will only be able to vie for 200 of the 400 seats in the House, confirmed to be fair by the Constitutional Court.
But Steenhuisen said that Parliament would have to figure out new rules and procedures that will accommodate them.
“You are essentially going to be injecting fish into a system designed for fowl and I don’t think Parliament has grappled with that nearly enough.”
Steenhuisen believes politics is a numbers game and the extent to which parties participate in committees, debates and question time is determined on proportionality.
“We have a minimum speaking time of two minutes in the House. But how do you allocate two minutes to an independent who scrapped through on 42,000 votes and then a party that’s got 80 or 100,000 votes is given the same minimum speaking time?”
Steenhuisen believes independent candidates are under the misapprehension that they will be represented in parliamentary structures in the same way as political parties.
-EWN
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