Parliament failed to vote the Border Management Agency Bill into law during the June 6 sitting.

And not because the bill was opposed or parliamentary voting technology was misbehaving – the ANC caucus could not guarantee that 201 of their own MPs were in the House to vote the bill into an act.

For the bill to be passed, a simple majority would have sufficed. When deputy speaker Lechesa Tsenoli asked members to vote on the bill during a sitting which began at 10am, only 188 members of the ruling were in the house. This gave opposition MPs a rare opportunity to embarass the ruling party by blocking the passing of the bill.

In terms of legislative procedure, National Assembly’s 400 MPs are required to vote bills into law before they are forwarded to the 90-member National Council of Provinces (NCOP) for concurrence.

READ MORE: Mthembu vows harsh punishment for absent MPs

Only at this point can the approved law be sent to the state president for assenting into an act.

Considering that the ruling party vociferously advocated for this legislation, which would have given government the authority to establish Border Management Agency, it is questionable that MPs were absent from the House sitting to process the bill.

Opposition parties argued earlier that the legislation was nothing else but another bureaucratic structure aimed at creating jobs for the ruling party’s deployees.

The agency would have consolidated border-management functions currently dispersed by Sars, SAPS, home affairs, SANDF and Airports Authority of South Africa (Acsa) functionaries under one structure. Port of Cape Town was identified as a pilot site for this home affairs-led agency.

It is not the first time the ruling has failed to pass bills because of its truant MPs. In 2016, ‘absent without notice’ MPs almost caused a fiscal crisis when the division of revenue amendment bill, commonly known as appropriation, could not be passed.

Treasury regulations require that the bill be passed into law on an annual basis in order “to appropriate money from the National Revenue Fund for the requirements of the state”.

John Steenhuisen, the chief whip of the opposition party, told The Citizen the ANC was not able “to pass legislation”, as they simply did not have “enough members in parliament to pass their own legislation”.

The ANC parliamentary caucus was asked where the MPs were, whether they would be disciplined and when the ruling party planned to reschedule the voting of the bill through the rules committee. They are yet to respond.

http://https://www.citizen.co.za/news/news-national/anc-finally-passes-contested-revenue-bill/

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