"It is clear that Minister Nxesi is doing everything possible to protect the President from being held accountable."
|||Cape Town - The DA wants Parliament to investigate Minister of Public Works Thulas Nxesi, who it says misled the House.
The call relates to the Public Works report on the more than R200 million spent on President Jacob Zuma’s private Nkandla homestead.
The DA’s spokeswoman on Public Works, Anchen Dreyer, was responding to reports by City Press around whether it was Nxesi his officials or State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele who had classified the document “top secret”, preventing its public scrutiny.
The questions stem from a letter to the National Assembly Speaker, Max Sisulu, in which Nxesi said his department’s task team had classified the report and he was unable to hand it over without its “being declassified by the authors”.
Dreyer said on Sunday: “This has subsequently been contradicted by the minister’s legal adviser, Phillip Masilo, who has claimed: ‘The fact of the matter is that the report was classified by the minister.’
“Furthermore, as head of the task team, Minister Nxesi is empowered to regrade the classification in terms of the Minimum Information Security Standards.
“To claim that he cannot do so is simply not true.
“It is clear that Minister Nxesi is doing everything possible to protect President Zuma from being held accountable for his role in this major corruption scandal.
“This cannot go unanswered, especially when it brings the integrity of Parliament into disrepute.
“An investigation must now follow into the minister’s conduct so that there can be consequences for these actions.”
This follows a Sunday Times report that quoted President Kgalema Motlanthe as criticising the classification.
Speaking on Power FM - a new Gauteng-based radio station - Motlanthe became the first senior cabinet member to call for the report to be made public, the Sunday Times said.
“There is no reason,” Motlanthe was quoted as saying, referring to the report’s being kept secret.
“Once there was a clamour and an outcry about it and an investigation is initiated there is no need to then shroud it in secrecy.
“Once there is a shroud of secrecy, it gives rise to speculation.
“It gives rise to suspicion. It gives rise to mistrust.”
The Mail & Guardian reported on Friday that the Department of Public Works had released to it 42 files with more than 12 000 pages on the improvements at Nkandla following the newspaper’s request for information under the Promotion of Access to Information Act. The documents related to bid evaluations, needs assessments, contracts awarded and their values, and if costs were allocated for public or private accounts.
Cape Argus