Abstract:
Parliamentary Portfolio Committees are engine rooms in legislatures, as their key
role includes ensuring policy objectives are met through effective implementation
by the executive branch and State owned Enterprises (SoEs), quality oversight and
enforced accountability. In South Africa, transformation targeted at Historically
Disadvantaged South Africans (HDSA) has been a government mandate since the
dawn of democracy in 1994, given the dispossession and disempowerment that
disadvantaged South Africans suffered under the Apartheid government.
In this article, an empirical investigation to evaluate effectiveness of legislative
oversight and accountability towards ensuring transformation targeted at HDSAs in
the petroleum downstream industry is conducted. The research relied on qualitativetriangulation
research paradigm; gathering information through observations,
document analysis and interviews with relevant committees. The Parliamentary
Portfolio Committee on Energy (PPCE), which oversees the petroleum industry,
among other sectors, was the major focus of the investigation. The PPCE conduct
numerous activities such as ‘questioning, committee hearings, legislation processing,
and site visits’ in order to ensure that government departments and relevant SoEs
are up to date on implementation of policy. From these activities, researchers
analysed the quality and focus of ‘questioning’ conducted by parliamentarians in
the period 2009 to 2014. Research revealed that PPCE questions for instance were
insufficiently linked to HDSA transformation in the petroleum industry and for
which oversight is sought.
