Ramaphosa to submit State Capture final report to Parliament in August

President Cyril Ramaphosa is seeking more time before submitting the final report of the Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture to Parliament.

This was revealed during the National Assembly’s Programming Committee meeting on Thursday morning.

National Assembly Speaker, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula told MPs during the virtual meeting that Ramaphosa requested via letter to be given until August after the commission, chaired by Acting Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, was granted another extension recently.

“The Zondo Commission will complete its work by the 30th of April. Following that, it is stated that the president will have four months to develop a plan for implementation of the recommendations.

“If you count the four months then you will see the president will only be required to submit the report to us by the end of August. That’s just a decision of court honourable members,” she said.

Ad Hoc Committee

Democratic Alliance (DA) deputy chief whip Siviwe Gwarube said Parliament would need to prepare to address the contents of the report before Ramaphosa hands it over.

“While the president will table the report at the end of August, I do believe that it is absolutely critical that Parliament does not simply wait for the Zondo Commission report to be tabled by the president before we can start setting up our system of how we are going to deal with the report.

“The report makes damning findings against Parliament and while it hasn’t formally been tabled there’s nothing stopping us to set up Ad Hoc Committees that will essentially deal with the report.

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“I disagree that we must wait until the end of August before this matter is dealt with by Parliament because the executive function that the president is doing is very separate to the process that Parliament should be following,” she said.

In her reply, Mapisa-Nqakula said the matter will be referred to a different structure to discuss whether an Ad Hoc Committee will need to be established or not.

 “I will request that at the appropriate forum which will be the Chiefs Whips Forum and perhaps even the Rules Committee if there is a need that we discuss this issue that we are proposing and not here in the programming committee.”

Meanwhile, ANC chief whip Pemmy Majodina said: “We will deal with the matter at the right forum because we must also be ready when that report is presented to us and what we do with as Parliament.”

Extension

On 23 February, the Pretoria High Court granted the Zondo Commission a further two month extension to complete its work.

It was the seventh extension that had been granted to the commission since its establishment.

When the commission initially approached the court, Zondo said the delays in submitting the full final report were due to a number of factors.

These included Zondo’s Judicial Service Commission (JSC) interview for the Chief Justice post as well as the fact that he needed more time to go through further documents on certain topics submitted to him.

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The commission has already submitted three volumes of the inquiry’s report to the Presidency.

The commission was announced in early 2018, and tasked with investigating allegations of state capture along with public sector corruption and fraud.

The inquiry began its work in August of that year and was initially given 180 days to wrap up.

The Citizen previously reported that the commission has collected 71,000 pages in submissions from more than 300 witnesses ever since the inquiry began its work.

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