Parliment will announce plans next year for a R325-million banqueting hall to be built in time for President Thabo Mbeki to deliver his last State of the Nation address to the legislature's biggest audience ever.

The three-storey circular building, part of an extensive parliamentary makeover planned by Speaker Baleka Mbete, will be erected across the road from Parliament on the site of an existing parking lot and buildings scheduled for demolition. Construction is due to begin around mid-2007 and the project should be completed before the 2009 general election.

Mbete said engineers also were assessing the possibility of putting hundreds of new offices on top of the existing National Assembly, parts of which date back more than 100 years, so that Parliament would be able to make good on a promise to give all 490 legislators a personal secretary with a separate office and to allow them to operate in their own languages.

Secretary to Parliament Zengile Dingani said the proposal for an iconic banqueting hall already had a thumbs up from Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, though he had withheld final approval pending more detailed plans likely to be ready in January.

"It will be a legacy project. We must showcase the new democracy, the new South Africa. It must be like the Eiffel tower in Paris. It must be able to show our African-ness as South Africans, all of us," he said, adding it would not be in the colonnaded colonial style of the existing buildings.

Mbete told the Sunday Times this was just one part of a sweeping plan to make Parliament bigger and better.

She and National Council of Provinces Chairman Mninwa Mahlangu have also appointed a 12-member panel of veteran politicians and influential analysts to review the work and suggest ways to make it more effective and more representative.

The panel includes former MP Max Sisulu, author and UCT Vice-Chancellor Njabulo Ndebele, former MP, deputy minister and Reserve Bank deputy governor Gill Marcus, broadcaster Tim Modise and liberal political veterans Colin Eglin and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert as well as analysts Judith February, Sipho Seepe and Aubrey Matshiqi.

Mbete said the panel would define its own terms of reference at a workshop in January and would be expected to report by July.

"Here are South Africans we trust, that the public has confidence in, who must come and help us. It's not because we believe we are a weak Parliament - we don't believe so, but nor do we believe we are a Parliament that has achieved the best we can achieve."

The panel does not include MPs or parliamentary officials.

Mbete said she wanted to build the status and reputation of Parliament and undo the damage done by allegations of corruption and sexual harassment by prominent MPs.

Sunday Times