Gauteng
7 March 2007
The National Council of Provinces (NCOP) will from 12 to 16 March, next
week, sit at the Saul Tsotetsi Recreation and Sports Centre at Sebokeng in the
Sedibeng District as part of its programme Taking Parliament to the People. The
programme was initiated in 2002 as part of ensuring that people directly take
part in their Parliament. Since then we have been to seven provinces namely,
Eastern Cape, North West, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Northern Cape and
Free State.
This programme is assisting us greatly towards realising our vision of
building "an effective people's Parliament that is responsive to the needs of
our people and that is driven by the ideal of realising a better quality of
life for all the people of South Africa".
When we launched it about five years ago we sought to achieve two main
things:
* to ensure that our communities are aware of participatory democracy (and
that they make use of this important and unique aspect of our democracy),
* to ensure that our people are educated and informed about the work of
Parliament and that their views do impact upon its work.
Since we started the NCOP visits to the provinces as part of this programme
have been received with great enthusiasm by the people, a sign that people do
want to take part in their Parliament. The issue is that they do not have the
resources to go to where our Parliament is located. Some of our people find it
even difficult to go to their provincial legislature. So it is important that
we make resources available and make the time to go to where they are and
interact with them. A number of provincial legislatures are doing that as
well.
The Constitution clearly states that as the NCOP we must provide a national
forum for the public consideration of issues affecting the provinces. This
visit in Free State is one such forum whereby working with the provincial
legislature and the municipality we go to the people and talk about issues that
are local, provincial and national. We consider a number of cross cutting
issues.
Besides providing us with an opportunity to interact directly with the
people, this programme also gives us an opportunity to understand the
challenges that are facing our people. The importance of this is the fact that
we then are able to monitor executive performance in addressing these
challenges. And it is through that collective effort that we can better respond
to the big challenge of improving the lives of our people for the better.
Since its inception in 2002, the programme has drawn thousands of people who
participate actively in the sessions by raising their concerns, challenges and
successes. Most importantly, they express openly what they want government to
do about the challenges they are faced with. So it is a partnership with the
people and a co-operative effort.
In Limpopo and in many of the provinces we observed the numbers of the
people attending exceeding 4 000 in just one day. It is therefore imperative
that we do not disappoint our people.
We are aware that visiting a part of a province for a week will never be
enough. But we are doing our best to ensure that we do make a difference. The
demand is to ensure that we assist with speeding up the delivery of services
and all of us are seized with this and will do whatever we can to ensure that
our programmes do make a difference to our people.
We have also strengthened our follow up. If there are issues to be addressed
within a short space of time, we do interact with the executive arm of
government to see what could be done. We do not wait for the report to be
adopted and so on, because our people need to be assisted.
During the coming week we will have open meetings, conduct visits to
schools, health centres and Expanded Public Works (EPW) projects and have
meetings with specific sectors to deal with specific issues.
Theme, 'Masijule Ngengxoxo Mzansi'
Issued by: National Council of Provinces
7 March 2007
