The parliamentary process to select the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) board has been given go-ahead after a failed court interdict bid.
This after the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday struck off the roll an urgent application by an aspirant board member to stop Parliament from continuing with further steps to appoint the agency’s board.
In a statement, parliamentary spokesperson Moloto Mothapo said the presiding judge agreed with Parliament that the applicant failed to make a case of urgency.
The court ruling came just two day before parliamentary committees tasked to select the NYDA board made their recommendations on the preferred candidates.
Letlhogonolo Modisane Maimane brought the urgent application after he was not among the 40 shortlisted candidates in the recent interviews held by the national legislature.
Parliament had called on the public to nominate persons to serve on the seven-member board before April 9.
Maimane’s application was received on April 8 and was recorded as number 690 when the names of candidates were published on the parliamentary website with CVs from 18 to 24 May.
When the national legislature published the names of 40 shortlisted candidates on May 27, Maimane was not on the list of shortlisted candidates the public made written comments on until June 5.
This had apparently prompted Maimane to instruct his attorney to issue a letter of demand against the national legislature on June 18, but he was informed his demand would not be met in a correspondence dated June 22.
He then launched his urgent application and cited National Assembly Speaker Thandi Modise and the co-chairpersons of the sub-committee of the Portfolio Committee on Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities as respondents six days later.
In his founding affidavit, Maimane claimed his rights would be violated if President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed the new board “on grounds that a fair process as far as the advertisement of all the shortlisted candidates for public comments can be inferred that it was not applied”.
Parliament opposed Maimane's application on the grounds that it was not urgent, among other things.
In court papers, co-chairperson of the sub-committee Nonhlanhla Ncube-Ndaba said leaving out National Council of Provinces chairperson Amos Masondo as a respondent was a material non-joinder and made the application fatally defective, that it was not urgent and it lacked merit.
Mothapo said the NYDA Act obliged Ramaphosa to appoint the youth agency’s board on recommendation of the two Houses of the national legislature, which established the sub-committee to process the more than 1000 applications.
He also said Maimane had conflated the publication of applicants’ CVs on the parliamentary website for transparency purposes with the publication of shortlisted applicants for interviews.
“His complaint appears to be that his CV was published a few days after the first CVs started being published on the website,” Mothapo said.
Political Bureau