The first session this year of the Fifth Parliament of South Africa kicked off on 26 January and will come to a close after eight weeks on 18 March. From 16 February to 23 March, this year, there are around 76 committee meetings scheduled for the National Assembly and National Council of Provinces. But how well has your MP performed so far and in the past?
This week the People's Assembly project – funded by the Indigo Trust, and which relies on Parliamentary Monitoring Group's reports on committee work – released a handy data crunching feature that tracks the attendance of MPs at committee meetings.
While the full People's Assembly Attendance records are available here, we offer, in the meantime, a few highlights.
In May last year, EFF MP and national spokesperson, Honourable Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, told the Mail and Guardian that while the party might be small it had “dedicated” MPs who would “ensure it is prepared for each committee plenary”.
However the People's Assembly tracking of the party's performance this year paints a rather different picture. So far the party has scored a 29 percent attendance rate, with 14 out of 26 members not attending any meetings. EFF leader Honourable Julius Malema too scored a zero percent rating having missed one meeting of the Mineral Resources committee which adopted the minutes of the Mpumalanga oversight report.
So far the ANC has scored an overall 70 percent attendance average with many MPs scoring 100 percent apart from Honourable Winnie Madikizela-Mandela who scored a predictable zero, missing the one meeting she was supposed to attend this year. In 2015 she scored 12 percent, attending two meetings out of 14, and in 2014 she scored another zero attending no meetings whatsoever.
