DURBAN, South Africa, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- South Africa's main opposition Democratic Party walked out of a special session of parliament convened to receive a report by the auditor-general and other investigative officers into the $6 billion arms deal that, it says, show signs of irregularity and corruption.
The walk-out, led by Douglas Gibson, the party's chief whip, was in protest over the nature of the meeting.
"We have been assembled here in Parliament and the speaker is in the chair but it is actually a government press conference," Gibson said. "There are no rules of debate, no means for us to state our point of view. The whole thing is a charade dressed up to look as if the report has gone to Parliament."
Members of the ruling African National Congress chanted "Out, out, out" as the DP left.
The DP has expressed doubts over the report.
They say President Thabo Mbeki went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that South Africa's most renowned anti-corruption investigator, Judge Willem Heath, was excluded from the investigation and his unit broken up.
The ANC's leader on the parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Andrew Feinstein, was forced off SCOPA and out of Parliament when he persisted in voicing his own doubts about the deal, it said. Twenty leading ANC figures, including the head of the army, Siphiwe Nyanda, and ANC Chief Whip Andrew Yengeni received Mercedes' either free or very cheap from one of the successful bidders for the arms contract, they say.
Yengeni has been forced out since then.
The DP said the government used apartheid-era legislation to require the auditor-general to submit his report first to the president and Cabinet and that they insisted he rewrite certain sections of it.
Thus, when it finally saw the light of day Thursday -- exonerating the government -- the DP treated it as a whitewash, because Parliament rises Friday, so there will be no time to debate the report.
In the eyes of many commentators one of the most damaging aspects of the affair is the harm it has already done to the standing of South Africa's first democratically elected Parliament.
Originally, SCOPA resolved Heath be included in the investigation but when the heat was put on, its ANC members began to deny they had voted through such a motion and SCOPA's minutes were retrospectively changed to reflect this, critics charge.
Moreover, Speaker Frene Ginwala, also a top ANC official, leaned hard on SCOPA and, in the eyes of the DP at least, abused the neutrality of her office.
When Yengeni was summoned before parliament's Ethics Committee to explain the various Mercedes' he had taken delivery of and why he had not owned up to them when registering his interests, he simply refused to appear before the Committee -- whose ANC majority allowed him to get away with this breach.
Similarly, on Wednesday Winnie Mandela was due to appear before the Committee to explain similarly irregular financial conduct on her part -- but the ANC members of the Committee, embarassed and even frightened at the thought of such a confrontation, simply failed to turn up so that the Committee was inquorate and couldn't meet.
Thursday's further confrontation between the Opposition and the Speaker and the suggestion she is party to an attempt to give parliamentary window-dressing to a publicity stunt by the executive to clear itself is a further sign of the badly frayed relationships and lack of trust that now permeate Parliament.
