Parliament receives fire and safety report from Cape Town mayor
The Presiding Officers of Parliament received a fire and safety report of the City of Cape Town Fire and Rescue Services from the Mayor of the City of Cape Town on Thursday 6 January. The report followed a three-day battle to extinguish the blaze that broke out on Sunday, 2 January 2022. It contains the firefighters’ preliminary observations during the course of their work, which is a standard procedure when dealing with incidents of this nature. The report does not in any way purport to provide conclusive findings and evidence regarding the cause and the circumstances surrounding the fire that gutted certain buildings at the Parliamentary precinct. The responsibility to investigate the source of the fire rests with the law enforcement agencies, and their investigation is currently underway. The City of Cape Town Fire and Rescue Services report is important, as it will assist the ongoing investigations both externally and internally. These investigations must be given the space they need to unfold. Parliament will only comment after these investigations are concluded. When they are finalised in due course, they will provide concrete evidence and findings regarding the fire. In the meantime, a multi-agency and multipronged investigations are underway, and will be in full swing once the whole building is declared safe and handed over to the investigation team. We wish to assure all the people in South Africa that we will leave no stone unturned to enable appropriate actions to be taken by all relevant authorities. A multidisciplinary team of professional engineers has now arrived in Parliament to determine
the cause of fire, the extent of damage, the safety of the building, and the estimate cost as well as timelines for repairs, and will provide a preliminary report in due course. As demonstrated during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Parliament will once again demonstrate its resilience and adaptability to ensure sustained delivery on its three-legged mandate of law-making, executive oversight and public participation. This phase requires resilience, to ensure that the work of Parliament carries on with minimal disruption, in consultation with other arms of the state including the Presidency and the custodian of public facilities – the Department of Public Works. We wish to assure you, the State of the Nation Address and the Budget Speech and other programmes will proceed as planned. Details will be shared when concrete alternatives are done. We have noted a number of speculative reports regarding the cause of this incident, including those circulating in the social media space. What has been even more worrying is that some of these statements have been attributed to formal statements by organisations. We reiterate our appeal for calm, caution against any speculation and encourage everyone to afford both the law enforcement authorities and forensics teams the space to investigate and provide the muchneeded conclusive information. The precinct of Parliament continues to be guarded by the South African Police Services, which was responsible for alerting the fire department when the fire started. Anyone with valuable information that they feel could assist in the investigations is encouraged to supply such to the relevant authorities, instead of making wild and unhelpful speculations. We are humbled by the messages of support and offers for assistance from various organisations and public institutions. We have received offers from both the provincial and local governments in the Western Cape for the temporary use of their office spaces and meeting rooms. We have also received messages of support from sister organisations, such as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Forum.