The most active parliamentary committees of 2025

Members of Parliament in the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) have been working tirelessly in 2025, spending over 260 hours in meetings throughout the year.

According to data from ParliMeter, the committee convened 55 times, with meetings spanning a total of 220 hours and 36 minutes as of the end of October 2025.

ParliMeter is a tool developed to track parliamentarians’ attendance and performance, and is co-funded by the European Union.

Additional calculations show that the committee spent another 42 hours convening during November, bringing the total as of the beginning of December to over 262 hours.

The committee has spent a significant amount of time over the past two months investigating the R40 billion Road Accident Fund. It has also experienced significant frustrations, with the entity’s CEO, Collins Letsoalo, refusing to appear before Parliament.

Second to SCOPA was the Portfolio Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies of Parliament, which convened for over 180 hours throughout the year across 41 meetings.

The committee addressed several critical matters within the portfolio, including the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s financial and operational sustainability.

This is an issue that has been on Communications Minister Solly Malatsi’s agenda for some time, given that the state broadcaster is on the brink of collapse, which will have a domino effect on several other entities within the portfolio.

However, an honourable mention is the Ad Hoc Committee set up to probe General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s claims of a criminal syndicate capturing the police and criminal justice system.

Allegations include the disbandment of the Political Killings Task Team, missing case dockets, blocked intelligence posts, a R360 million contract scandal, and IPID interference.

The committee was created on 23 July and began with witness testimonies on 6 October. While disagreements between parties stalled the investigation, it had racked up 74 hours of meetings by the end of October.

November was even more intense, with some testimonies lasting several days and often extending late into the evening, and sometimes the early hours of the morning.

Parliamentarians spent roughly 100 hours in meetings throughout the month, bringing the total number of hours as of the end of November 2025 to approximately 171.

RAF inquiry

A significant amount of SCOPA’s time has been spent on the RAF inquiry, which has uncovered far-reaching governance failures at the entity.

According to the committee’s chairperson, “dysfunction is the right way to describe it.”

The RAF board recently placed its acting CEO, CFO, Chief Governance Officer and the Head of the CEO’s office on precautionary suspension.

One of the most alarming revelations, Zibi noted, is that a significant change to the fund’s accounting policy, affecting 500,000 claimants, was implemented without any recorded executive meeting or board approval.

Suppliers were consulted, and preparations were made before the RAF’s own governance structures had even discussed the decision.

SCOPA also heard that the RAF outsourced nearly R1 billion in procurement to two external companies, each awarded contracts worth R500 million, without examining invoices or questioning the spending.

This lack of oversight allowed suppliers to procure goods from relatives and friends at allegedly inflated prices.

In addition, the RAF has spent more than R100 million on disciplinary cases over the past five years, routinely employing external lawyers and chairpersons who charge hourly rates.

Many employees remained on suspension for up to four years without being charged, while acting staff filled their posts, effectively doubling salary costs.

The committee also heard that the RAF’s decision to dismiss its panel of attorneys resulted in thousands of unattended court cases.

Current attorneys are each handling up to 5,000 matters, forcing them to appear in multiple courts simultaneously. When they can’t, the RAF either pays full costs for postponements or suffers inflated default judgments, adding billions to its liabilities.

Zibi said SCOPA has put measures in place to protect witnesses, including allowing key individuals to testify anonymously via virtual appearance, using pseudonyms with verification by Home Affairs and the SIU.

Despite concerns about intimidation, he insisted that the investigation would continue.

Letsoalo, which the committee found had spent R23 million on bodyguards, has denied wrongdoing and called the probe “a witch-hunt by lawyers and the media.”