ADDRESS BY LB Gaehler EC NCOP MP
TOGETHER MOVING THE NCOP FORWARD AS A VANGUARD OF THE INTERESTS OF PROVINCES
Hon Chairperson and Honourable Members
Indeed there is more to be gained from running a cohesive and well-co-ordinated system for this house to avoid working in silo and harmful completion and costly duplication of efforts across the sphere of government.
It is in this house that all spheres of government, at a legislative level, can find a concrete expression of an integrated approach towards people driven and centred development.
The integration of development planning and implementation across the three spheres must be the prime are of focus of this house. Such approach will be a ensuring efficient service delivery is achieve through good working relationship between all role partners.
In order to improve our capacity to discharge our work thus making this house, effective as a vanguard of the interests of the people in provinces and in municipalities, we need amongst others, to:
• Improve our planning and coordination of the work of this house through a well-designed and managed programming process;
• Structure our agenda in a manner that does not take long but secure and sustain qualitative and productive debates; It is a matter of nature and fact, that a human body gets a level of exhaustion after a certain time of concentration;
• Spread our work evenly and where possible equal through-out the months of our work. Currently we turn to load the third and fourth term of parliament with heavy loads of work, resulting to unnecessary pressure that my compromise the ability to do quality work;
• We need to devise legal mechanisms and methods of ensuring that the oversight reports we send to government departments, provincial and local governments, are attended to and reports on actions taken thereto, are presented to the house in time;
• It cannot be an outing followed by a talk show and ends there, because we will be failing the constitutional purpose of this house; and
• Reports and views of this house on various audit reports should be acted on by departments, provinces and municipalities, and reports on what has been done be brought back to this house.
This house, should and can only be able to claim it vanguard role, when the conditions of our people are improving. To be a vanguard must primarily be about, a consistent and practical determination by all spheres of government, to effectively address the historical challenges which condemned the majority of citizens to marginalisation.
We must bring back the pride of all South Africans by amongst others, ensuring that the quality of our democracy is that which is fostering and strengthening intergovernmental relations as a necessary ingredient for sustainable development.
Our programme content and outlook, must envisage increased oversight work which is guided by inputs from all provinces and municipalities with regard to the needs of all citizens.
At all times, ours must be about, for, with and driven by the people with government and other role player as facilitators.
Thank you
