Sport Minister Gayton McKenzie and the department’s director-general have come under fire for repeatedly skipping Parliament’s sport committee, with chairperson Joe McGluwa accusing the minister of turning his attention to football while avoiding direct parliamentary scrutiny.
McGluwa lashed out at the minister and the department’s leadership on Tuesday as the committee met the South African Institute for Drug-Free Sport and Boxing SA.
Deputy Sport Minister Peace Mabe attended but McKenzie and the Director-General, Cynthia Khumalo did not.
McGluwa said the repeated absences were becoming a problem, particularly with the committee preparing to consider its Budgetary Review and Recommendation Report.
He said he had previously asked Khumalo how seriously he regarded committee meetings.
“These are very important meetings, members. I want to stress that entities report to the department, and as a result the department reports to us. Having the Minister and the DG present ensures that oversight is direct and immediate. That is a fact,” McGluwa said.
McGluwa acknowledged that the minister and Director-General had demanding schedules, but said that could not become an excuse for repeatedly missing parliamentary oversight.
“The committee has to demand answers not just from the entities or DSAC alone. They must also demand answers from the highest authority,” he said.
“It is very concerning that we have this kind of trend in our meetings, where we have absences of this nature at a time when we are about to discuss and approve matters pertaining to the BRRR,” he said.
The BRRR is Parliament’s mechanism for assessing a department’s performance and expenditure and making recommendations on its budget.
McGluwa said the committee’s work could not be reduced to a procedural exercise.
“These meetings and the BRRR are not ticking boxes. It is a parliamentary instrument, and it is very, very serious,” he said.
He welcomed acting Director-General Mr Vusi Ndima but made it clear that another acting appointment did not resolve the committee’s concerns.
“For you, it might be a good thing to act. But for us, it is a bad thing to be told every time that there is an acting DG in our meetings,” McGluwa said.
The chairperson then turned his attention to McKenzie’s increasingly public intervention in the dispute over the South African Football Association’s use of R30 million allocated for VAR technology.
McKenzie has demanded that Safa return the money amid delays in implementing the technology.
“I see that the minister has now turned into a VAR review committee, summoning football leadership to explain delays. I thought it was money that had been borrowed or allocated, which must be used by Safa. But now it is a sort of review committee from the ministry dealing with this,” he said.
McGluwa said Parliament’s committee was still waiting for answers on the matter.
He warned that the minister’s intervention risked blurring the line between executive authority and parliamentary oversight.
“Sometimes there are symbolic optics. But what we have to discuss here is that this committee will be the watchdog of entities. We cannot allow the ministry to be the watchdog of governance,” he said.
The clash comes as Parliament prepares to scrutinise the department’s spending and performance through the BRRR process.
For McGluwa, the issue is not simply whether McKenzie attends individual meetings.
It is whether the minister and the department’s leadership are willing to face Parliament when MPs are demanding answers while the minister simultaneously takes a hands-on role in disputes involving sporting bodies.