African Peer Review Mechanism

1
African Peer Review Mechanism
2
Methodology

• Parliament undertook a number of activities to
  give effect to its mandate. These included
• Participating in an orientation workshop
• Identifying focus areas for broad public
  consultation
• Conducting public hearings throughout the
  country
• Conducting an audit of all international
  instruments and standards relating to democracy
  and good political governance that have been
  signed, ratified and/or acceded to by South
  Africa
• Inviting written submissions on questions
  relating to the objectives of Parliaments focus
  areas.
• Facilitating debate through radio and television
  phone-ins.
• Debates amongst political parties within
  Parliament were conducted.

3
Limitations

• Parliament noted with concern various factors
  that limited its work, such as tight timeframes
  compromised public participation and
  unavailability of stakeholders.
• Communication gaps between Parliament and civil
  society, which affected the level of
  participation by civil society shortened time
  frames and the lack of feedback from government
  departments.
• Within the countrys evolving democratic culture,
  there are still challenges that are confronting
  the effectiveness of the countrys measures to
  foster broader participation, including poor
  communication, lack of information, and
  complicated processes
• Provincial government as well as Municipalities,
  in particular, should enhance their programmes of
  public participation in order to ensure constant
  interaction with communities.
• Municipalities should improve the content and
  structure of the Integrated Development Planning
  process in order to enhance the involvement of
  vulnerable groups such as people with
  disabilities, women, and the youth.
• Parliament should launch a comprehensive
  awareness campaign explaining the various
  protocols governing participation in
  parliamentary activities such as public hearings
  and making submissions.
• Parliament should comprehensively restructure
  participation of and mass communication with
  vulnerable and marginalised groups.
• Parliament should ensure a creative and effective
  resourcing as well as utilisation of
  Parliamentary Constituency Offices in order to
  ensure that they play a major role in interacting
  with and educating communities about Parliament.
• All political parties should allocate sufficient
  constituency resources in order to ensure that
  they constantly keep in touch with the people and
  are able to inform the public about Parliamentary
  activities.
• There is a need for the usage of plain language
  in policy documents and laws in order to ensure
  that ordinary people are able to comprehend them.

4
Role of Parliamentarians

• Parliament will to have an ongoing role in
  overseeing the implementation of the programme of
  action that will emanate from the peer review
  mechanism.
• Public awareness of Institutions established to
  strength democracy (Auditor General, Human Rights
  Commission etc.) is still minimal and needs to be
  improved.
• There is a need for an on-going and lively public
  discourse on good governance aided by an active
  and interested media.
• Business needs to take a lead in setting good
  standards for corporate governance. The business
  community has recognised, by and large, that one
  of the primary drivers for good governance must
  be the social and economic transformation of the
  country from an inequitable to a more equitable
  society.
• Municipal and Provincial government should
  investigate partnerships with civil society which
  support the capacitating of the NGO sector and in
  particular affected communities in monitoring and
  evaluation of government and of the corporate
  sector behaviour.
• The power of the corporate sector needs to be
  balanced by an empowered, civil society, aware
  of, and able to, exercise its rights.
• The monitoring and reporting of compliance with
  legislating relating to disability should be
  strengthened.
• A major challenge that is facing sustainable
  development in South Africa is the role of
  vulnerable groups such as women, the youth,
  people with disabilities and rural communities in
  development structures and their benefit from
  development projects. Vulnerable groups such as
  women, the youth and people with disabilities
  still have a larger share of the poverty burden,
  which can also be explained by their
  disadvantaged position in the labour market, in
  terms of jobs and incomes.
• Parliament needs to reinforce its oversight role
  on international commitments and platforms such
  as the World Summit on Sustainable Development
  (WSSD) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as
  far as they affect the countrys path to
  self-reliance in development and building
  capacity for sustainable development.
• With increasing decentralisation of governance
  responsibilities and decision-making to
  lower-levels of government, local institutions,
  communities and public participation has emerged
  as a fundamental tenet in the promotion of local
  governance. Parliament must put in place various
  mechanisms and measures to ensure that the
  broader population are active participants in the
  governance of the affairs of the country.

5
Community Consultations

• Communities remain largely unaware of the role of
  Parliament and Provincial Legislatures.
• Parliaments working, as far as possible, should
  be opened to the public and media to contribute
  to accelerating the decimation of information
  relating to policy and laws.
• Communities were not knowledgeable about their
  political representatives at provincial and
  national levels. Local Government
  representatives however interacted with their
  local communities.
• There was a lack of awareness on the budget
  process and communities therefore expressed the
  need for more active participation in the budget
  process.
• There is a need to capacitate community
  representatives about the Integrated Development
  Planning process to ensure that they are able to
  sufficiently educate communities about their
  value in enhancing participation.
• Parliament should put in place a mechanism to
  respond to and attend to public queries.
• Parliament should enhance the integration and
  participation of civil society in its oversight
  work, particularly in initiatives that are aimed
  at taking Parliament to the people.
• Parliament should ratify and implement the
  resolution taken by the 113th General Assembly of
  the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the importance
  of civil society in a democracy.
• Accessibility of courts emerged as a consistent
  challenge in municipalities across the geographic
  and socio-economic spectrum. The factors that
  hinder accessibility were more severe in
  semi-urban and rural communities. These included
• Distance to courts