MPs hard at work for R1 million pay cheque

THE NKANDLA ad hoc committee is one of 30 committees on oversight visits this week, triggering a Parliamentary Communication Services (PSC) alert headed “Committees of Parliament hard at work”.

Oversight visits – like processing legislation, briefings from officials and dealing with annual report and strategic plans and attending sittings – form the core of ordinary MPs’ work. For this they receive an annual salary of just shy of R1 million.

While political sparks are set to fly in the Nkandla special committee, the standing committee on appropriations visit to the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) could prove interesting in the wake of last week’s effective dismissal of CEO Lucky Montana amid board fights and controversy over the tender for locomotives that were reportedly unsuitable.

The MPs are meant to “determine the progress made by Prasa on the delivery of infrastructure projects under the station modernisation project and to assess its readiness for the roll-out of the rolling stock fleet renewal programme”, according to the PSC alert.

As load shedding continues in midwinter, and government opening the bid for a nuclear build programme this month, the parliamentary energy is visiting the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa), the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa) and, together with the public enterprise committee, Eskom’s national control centre. A meeting with the power utility is also scheduled

Limpopo appears a firm favourite: the committees of arts and culture, water and sanitation, agriculture, forestry and fisheries and health are there this week as is the co-operative governance and traditional affairs committee, which also visits the North-West.

The basic education committee is in Limpopo and Mpumalanga to visit farm and rural schools, while the higher education committee is visiting universities of technology in Cape Town.