Following the recent judgment by the Constitutional Court in the matter of Economic Freedom Fighters v Speaker of the National Assembly, H.E. Thabo Mbeki has authorized the republication of his letter originally addressed to Deputy President Paul Mashatile on 29 March 2023.
The Patron fully supports the Constitutional Court’s judgment. The Court’s ruling firmly affirms the constitutional principles and views he previously expressed in his correspondence to the Deputy President.
In the attached letter, H.E. Mbeki noted that he was deeply disturbed by the votes cast in the National Assembly on 13 December 2022 and 22 March 2023. These votes effectively stopped the formation of a Multi-Party Committee and a Parliamentary Multi-Party Ad-Hoc Committee mandated to investigate the allegations.
The Patron emphasised that Parliament has an obligatory constitutional task to exercise oversight over the Executive. He warned that our fundamental law, the Constitution, obliges everybody, including political parties, to operate within certain boundaries. Crucially, he highlighted that no political party has a legal right to block the National Assembly from exercising its oversight over the Executive.
The recent Constitutional Court judgement re-asserts the significance of our constitutional architecture, reaffirming that Parliament must act as “the voice of the SA, to properly execute its constitutional and statutory obligations without partisan obstruction.