Officials under fire for parliament blaze
Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure Patricia de Lille together with Parliament officials have come under fire after several Members of Parliament expressed their dissatisfaction on the maintenance of Parliament.
De Lille says while firefighter experts have been roped on to investigate the fire that took place in parliament this week, all systems were fully functional before the fire broke out.
She says all CCTV footage has been handed to the authorities as part of investigations.
"We first have to wait now for the city of Cape Town's fire team to hand over the building to the SAPS because it is a crime scene and to hand over the building to the Department of Public Works to allow our engineering team and professionals access to the building."
De Lille and officials were presenting a progress report on repairs and investigations following the blaze at parliament.
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Meanwhile, as part of their response, MP's grilled the officials questioning if indeed all systems were up to date as reported.
DA's Siviwe Gwarube says the Parliamentary Protective Services needs to come forth to answer questions about a possible security breach.
"We are only getting one side view of what has happened if we are only hearing the report from Public Works it will be useful to hear from Parliamentary Protective Services themselves on what has happened and what went wrong."
"If there are security breaches it would be useful to understand where they emanate from and where do we start to get to the bottom of this as to how it was allowed to happen and who we can hold accountable."
The IFP's Narend Singh says it appears as if there is no one who was monitoring the CCTV screens at the time of the fire.
