JOHANNESBURG, South Africa
The home expenses of South
African ministers came under intense scrutiny Sunday after it was revealed that
vast sums have been spent on curtains, kitchens and killing cockroaches.President Cyril Ramaphosa
The leading opposition party,
the Democratic Alliance (DA), said it was submitting a complaint to the anti-graft
watchdog about what appeared to be "brazen corruption and tender
inflation" in the upkeep of ministerial mansions.
"Our country simply
cannot afford to keep paying for the luxury lifestyles of Ministers who live
like Rockstars, while load-shedding, unemployment and poverty are at crisis
levels," Leon Schreiber, DA shadow minister for public service, said,
using a local term to describe power outages.
The move came after the
government disclosed that between 2019 and 2022 it spent about 93 million rand
($4.8 million) to maintain 97 properties occupied by public representatives,
including government ministers, in Cape Town and Pretoria.
The refurbishing of a Cape
Town kitchen cost taxpayers 1.4 million rand, while replacing a curtain rail
and getting rid of cockroaches at two separate Pretoria addresses were billed
54,000 and 240,000 rand respectively.
The revelations are likely to
add to the woes of President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was championed as a
graft-busting saviour after the corruption-tainted tenure of predecessor Jacob
Zuma -- but has since been embroiled in scandals of his own.
A large chunk of the money was
spent to install, repair or refill power generators that keep the lights on at
ministers' homes amid a worsening energy crisis that has most of the rest of
the nation sit in the dark for up to 12 hours a day.
Swimming pool maintenance also
featured prominently, with 388 invoices filed over the period taken into
consideration in what the DA said was "the single most common maintenance
expense".
The disclosures, which came in
response to a parliamentary question filed by the DA, prompted Public Works and
Infrastructure Minister Sihle Zikalala to order an investigation, saying some
costs were "not justifiable" and smacked of
"mischief".
Yet, the minister attempted to
shield his cabinet colleagues from blame, with his office pointing the finger
at "service providers" that, it said, seemed to be using the
government as a "milking cow".
"As government we are not
prepared to defend the indefensible but we will exercise our strong oversight
to clean up this area, which is unfairly discrediting public officials,"
Zikalala said Saturday.
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