EDITORIAL: An ANC tale of two countries

The government is, in fact, right. Taxpayers have not been footing ministers’ water and electricity bills since April this year — but rather since 2019, when the new ministerial handbook took effect. 

But the largesse doesn’t stop there: South Africans also foot the bill for ministers’ domestic workers, their internet and Wi-Fi, and their DStv.

It really is, in this tale of two countries, the best of times (for the ANC ministers) and the worst of times (for their subjects). 

To taxpayers buckling under brutal electricity hikes (15.6% in April 2021, and 9.6% this year), it sits poorly that these pampered elites are shielded from the wallet-busting increases everyone else has to shoulder. But this is especially galling when you consider that deputy ministers and ministers are paid more than R2m a year — putting them in the top 0.1% of earners.            

It reinforces the reality that these latter-day Marie Antoinettes are entirely divorced from the gritty realities of everyday existence. If you’re wondering why there’s so little urgency to fix what’s broken, this lack of alignment should be your first clue.

The problem is, this dissonance is growing. When ministers scream through load-shedding-induced traffic snarl-ups in blue-light brigades, with little more than a “let them eat cake”, you can see why they’d be left cold by complaints about blackouts.

Trade union federation Cosatu described the revelation that ministers’ utility costs had been covered while everyone else struggles as “shameful and scandalous”. 

“It is extremely insensitive for this administration to cushion off the members of the executive, while imposing extreme sacrifices on the workers and unemployed,” said spokesperson Sizwe Pamla.

While some argue that ministers earn small sums compared with the CEOs of most companies, this is a red herring.

In no other countries do elected politicians earn close to the CEOs of the largest corporations, because corporations create jobs and earn money, while the government consumes it in the form of taxes.

It is true that many government departments are vastly complicated, so their job isn’t easy. But many of our ministers do nothing to earn their salaries; at worst, they’re actively destructive.

This week, co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, for instance, was taken to task by MPs from her own party for R3bn in fraudulent payments made to dead people in her department’s community work programme. 

When this is the standard of oversight and political strategy, it makes it harder to stomach these heavyweights also being spared the strains that the wider citizenry, dealing with the consequences of those politicians’ failures, have to endure.

For President Cyril Ramaphosa to have inked these changes to the ministerial handbook, almost surreptitiously, to allow these perks undercuts the legitimacy of his calls for any kind of social compact. 

Cosatu has now, rightly, called for these “vulgar and tone-deaf” perks to be scrapped. 

Ramaphosa’s ministers should see the sanity of heeding that call: this is not a government that can afford to be seen luxuriating in brightly lit palaces, a world away from the country of their subjects.