he Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes President Cyril Ramaphosa's assenting to the General Intelligence Laws Amendment (GILA) Bill.
Intelligence and security services are an essential part of any modern state. What is critical is to ensure there are sufficient checks and balances, transparency and oversight mechanisms set in law to prevent their potential abuse. South Africa saw the real costs of such shenanigans during the decade of state capture when the State Security Agency and other intelligences organs were wantonly abused for personal, criminal and factional purposes.
The Act provides a welcome response to these abuses and more specifically to the Presidential High-Level Panel led by Dr. Sydney Mufamadi that made clear recommendations on overhauling the existing and clearly weak legislation providing oversight over the security and intelligence services.
Many parts of the Act that are straight forward, e.g. establishing a National Intelligence Academy and separating domestic and foreign intelligence services.
COSATU was deeply worried by several clearly unconstitutional clauses in the initial 2023 draft of the Bill. We are pleased that following objections from COSATU and others, government acted immediately to remove these clauses.
We welcome critical and progressive amendments made to the Bill during the extensive Parliamentary hearings, including tightening definitions of threats to national and state security, judicial checks and balances for bulk monitoring of communications, clauses prohibiting any illegal instructions or acts by members of the security services, as well as the separation of the budgets for the Office of the Inspector-General for Intelligence and the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee from that of the State Security Agency.
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Whilst COSATU supports these positive amendments to the Act, we believe the 7th Parliament should further strengthen it to ensure the findings of the Inspector-General are binding upon state intelligence organs that it is constitutionally bound to monitor. This is critical to ensure the state's security and intelligence agencies perform their constitutional mandates and are held accountable.
The Federation draws comfort from government and Parliament, led by the African National Congress' commitment to upholding the Constitution and strengthening oversight of the state, and their political maturity to make critical legislative amendments when COSATU and other sober stakeholders raise concerns and make proposals. This is key to sustaining and nurturing our hard-won democracy. It is a lesson that the barking carnivals of fringe elements who thrive on hate speech, social media likes, and disinformation would be wise to learn from.
