Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa says the government is revising the National Key Points Act and assessing the list of sites.
|||Cape Town - The government is revising the controversial National Key Points Act and auditing the list of sites covered by the apartheid-era legislation, Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa announced on Thursday.
Delivering his budget vote speech in Parliament, Mthethwa said a draft National Key Points Bill had been developed in 2007 and had reached the National Economic Development and Labour Council before “certain issues” stopped its progress.
He said he had earlier this year asked his legal team to “to begin the process of refining” the bill so it could be introduced to Parliament.
The existing act, used with other laws to cloak the activities of the apartheid security establishment in secrecy, was being re-aligned with the constitution and other legislation.
At the same time, Mthethwa said, he had appointed an advisory committee to help “in evaluating, auditing and assessing the desirability of all national key points” to decide how they should be aligned to constitutional prescripts.
It would be led by advocate Hamilton Maenetje as an external legal counsel, a representative from the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and the Civilian Secretariat for Police.
The government invoked the National Key Points Act earlier this year when it chose to keep under wraps a report on its investigation into the R206 million spent on President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla home.
Deputy Public Works minister Jeremy Cronin has described the act as a “dastardly” piece of legislation that was probably unconstitutional.
Parliament has provisionally scheduled a debate on the matter for next month, and Mthethwa’s move will place him in a stronger position to fend off the opposition when he responds as the minister in charge of the legislation.
He expected the revised bill to be introduced to Parliament before the end of this financial year.
Murray Hunter of the Right2Know Campaign (R2K) said it was “a draconian secrecy law that has been used and abused undermine the rights of ordinary people”. If Mthethwa was committed to undoing the “many years of damage, going all the way back to apartheid years”, he should release the list of national key points and of strategic installations.
It emerged in the wake of the Gupta scandal that Waterkloof Air Force Base was not, as claimed, a national key point falling under the police department, but a strategic installation, which falls under the military.
R2K had been calling for the list to be released since last year and had even launched a request for it under the Promotion of Access to Information Act, “so far to no avail”.
“We accept the need for a limited degree of secrecy for national security reasons, but what we have here is an unjust secrecy law,” Hunter said.
“If the act is to be reviewed, it is crucial that there is full public participation to prevent abuses of power and the exclusion of critical voices - and there can be no meaningful public engagement until SAPS provides the information that civil society has called for.”
The DA, which called for the parliamentary debate on the act, dismissed the possibility of the new legislation reaching Parliament before next year’s elections. The police portfolio committee was “so far behind in legislation” it could not process bill this year, said DA spokeswoman on police Dianne Kohler Barnard.
Mthethwa was merely trying to cover himself after the Nkandla spending had been exposed. The fact that apartheid legislation had been used to hide the spending was the issue and Mthethwa had made the announcement in anticipation of the debate.
craig.dodds@inl.co.za
Political Bureau