Daily Maverick
Dailymaverick logo

South Africa

South Africa

Empowering citizens: New ParliMeter tool enhances accountability in South Africa's democracy

Empowering citizens: New ParliMeter tool enhances accountability in South Africa's democracy
Suné Payne
By Suné Payne
6 Mar 2025
Facebook
2
GroundWork Collective founder Mbali Ntuli said, ‘Democracy becomes strong because you have citizens that are able to hold politicians accountable.’

A new parliamentary oversight tool, ParliMeter, has been described by Mbali Ntuli, former DA MP and founder of the civil society group GroundWork Collective, as “very important” for South Africans to understand what public representatives are doing, enabling them to put pressure on them. 

Ntuli was speaking in Cape Town on Thursday, 6 March at a launch of the ParliMeter tool, an innovative parliamentary oversight dashboard. 

The tool was created by the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa), in collaboration with OpenUp and the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG). 

“Democracy becomes strong because you have citizens that are able to hold those politicians accountable and put real pressure on them,” Ntuli said.

Since leaving formal politics as a DA MP and later a member of the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature, Ntuli founded the GroundWork Collective, an organisation that aims to teach communities about their civic rights to help them empower their lives.

During last year’s general election, GroundWork Collective led registration drives aimed at young people and encouraged South Africans to sign up as election observers.

Read more: Mbali Ntuli — voting may be individual, but democracy is critically a collective responsibility

On Thursday, Ntuli said: “We’re one of the most participatory democracies on paper. We have the legislation that allows us to be a part of decision making at every single step, and yet as citizens, we really haven’t been taking that opportunity.”

“It’s no wonder when only 58% of us [bothered] to vote that we have the crisis that we have… We were all worried about the budget speech, but it’s a direct result of us not participating in our democracy,” Ntuli said of the turnout at the May 2024 general elections. 

Making accountability accessible 


ParliMeter is a tool which is intended to improve transparency, access to information and accountability. The tool uses data sourced from Parliament via PMG to provide insights into key parliamentary activities. These include tracking MP attendance in plenary sessions and committees, Bill progression and displaying the number and duration of committee meetings. 

Ntulli said she thought ParliMeter came at an “excellent time” as in South Africa’s ever-changing democracy, the “psychological barrier has been broken” in the belief that only one party could be in power for so long. 

“It’s one thing to say that people must participate; it’s another for them to actually feel as though they have the information and the access to be able to understand what’s actually happening.”

Ntuli said people would increasingly see, not just from Outa, OpenUp and PMG, “but more organisations, including the one that I run, more ways to make sure that citizens can actually access this information in a way that is easy, because nobody has time to digest”. 

In a media release after the launch, Outa said: “Our ParliMeter tool is designed to be used by those who want to keep watch on what Parliament is doing: parliamentarians, civil society, journalists, government officials and the general public.”

You can access ParliMeter here. DM

Categories:

Tags: