Parliament - The National Assembly on Wednesday decided to send the list of nominations for positions on the Icasa council back to the portfolio committee on communications following the controversy about the criminal record of one of the candidates, former Mbeki aide Thami Ntenteni.
The House did so on the recommendation of ANC chief whip Stone Sizani, after a vote to approve the nominations to fill five vacancies on the communications sector regulator’s board was postponed on Tuesday.
Ahead of the scheduled vote, Democratic Alliance MP Gavin Davis read out a submission to the assembly in which he raised the issue that Ntenteni had reportedly been convicted of culpable homicide in the late 1990s.
Davis said the Democratic Alliance (DA) objected to Ntenteni’s nomination because the Icasa Act stated that a person may not be appointed to the council if they had been sentenced to a period of imprisonment exceeding one year without the option of a fine.
“Reports in the public domain indicate that, in 1998, the BMW that Mr Ntenteni was driving on the Ben Schoeman Highway crashed into a Volkswagen Passat from behind at high speed. One woman was killed and three others were injured,” he said.
“The courts found Mr Ntenteni guilty of driving under the influence of alcohol, and culpable homicide. It is understood that he was sentenced to at least three years in prison, which would explain the gap on his CV between 1998 and 2001.”
Ntenteni was one of eight candidates recommended by the committee, which traditionally nominates one and a half times the number of candidates to the number of empty seats on the Icasa council.
On Friday, before reports of his criminal record surfaced, he was appointed to the Media Development and Diversity Agency board by President Jacob Zuma, along with Lumko Mtimde, a supporter of the ANC’s proposal to establish a media appeals tribunal to regulate the media.
The DA argued that Ntenteni should now be considered ineligible for both that position, as well as a slot on the Icasa council.
The matter has raised another controversy in that communications portfolio committee chairwoman told the Sunday press that Ntenteni had passed the security vetting process to which all the Icasa council candidates were subjected. She stressed that this vetting process was not conducted by the committee.
Davis said it was “difficult” to see how the state security services had failed to detect a problem.
Davis has also written to Zuma regarding Ntenteni’s appointment to the MDDA board, asking whether the presidency conducted a background check on him and whether it revealed the reported conviction. If so, he asked that the presidency say on which ground it deemed the appointment legally valid.
ANA