anthea herbert🩵💫🩵

Will SCOPA do its work on state capture at PRASA? I want to be fair to SCOPA. It is drowning in malfeasance from every level of the state, and it must prioritise. And SCOPA has not been the worst offender. That distinction belongs to the Portfolio Committee on Transport, which in 2017 and 2018 spent its energy attacking the lawyers who had uncovered the corruption rather than the people who committed it, and whose chairperson later told the Zondo Commission that she “toed the party line” when an inquiry was called for. It belongs to the Joint Ethics Committee, which has sat on our complaints against six Members of Parliament implicated at PRASA since 2022, forcing us into three years of litigation in the Western Cape High Court against Parliament’s own trench lawfare. But SCOPA’s record is not clean. In November 2016 an ANC member reminded the committee that it had the power to summon Lucky Montana. It never did. In February 2020 the Committee resolved to seek delinquent-director proceedings against PRASA’s former boards and to hold a full parliamentary inquiry. Neither happened. Across a decade, SCOPA has never called a single one of the people whom the Public Protector, National Treasury’s forensic investigators, the courts and the Zondo Commission identified as central to the looting: not Sfiso Buthelezi, not Montana, not Makhensa Mabunda, not Roy Moodley, not Mario Ferreira. Two of them sat in Parliament while SCOPA heard evidence about them. tinyurl.com/yc4ks756 @kunenephindz @pierredevos @FDingiswayo @ferialhaffajee @SongezoZibi