Parliament Tour- June 6th

Last Friday we went on a tour of Parliament which is only a few blocks away. There is a street full of all of the parliament buildings which you need permission to access. We all had to give our passport information ahead of time just to be able to go on the tour. The only pictures I have are the outside of the buildings as we were not allowed to take pictures inside the building. I heard the current president supposedly spent R250,000,000 (25 million) of the governments money remodeling his vacation home.

Although I am not particularly interested in the way government works, there were some interesting things that I picked up. First of all, the way the public votes for the president is different than the way we do it in the US and I think many other countries. Parliament consists of two Houses; the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces. The National Assembly has 400 members of Parliament and the voters pick the political party whom they want to represent their country. By doing so they are trusting that the party will pick the best candidate whom is already part of parliament (all presidents must come from the parliament).

The National Assembly is divided by the percentage of votes it receives during the election. So if a particular party receives half of the votes, they will hold half of the seats in the National Assembly. Also, when parliament meets, the public is allowed to sit in on their meetings provided that they requested to do so ahead of time and provided their passport information. But you are there strictly as an observer. They also are able to keep their meetings to the allotted time, because each party is allowed only enough time to speak based on the size of seats they hold in the National Assembly.

South Africa has three capitals. The House of Parliament is located in Cape Town and is the legislative capital; Pretoria is the administrative capital and is the seat of the President and Cabinet; and Bloemfontein is the seat of the Supreme Court of Appeal which makes it the judicial capital, however the Constitutional Court of South Africa is in Johannesburg. Someone on the tour asked why South Africa had three capitals, and although I remember the gist of the answer, I found this online. “This concept dates back to the creation of the Union of South Africa, where conflicting views on which city should hold the capital led to this compromise. Much like the very idea of the balance of powers, leaders of early South Africa decided that having all government centralized in one place could give that place too much power, so it divided the branches among three provinces.”

 Information came from http://www.mapsofworld.com/south-africa/national-capital.html