Exclusive: DA reveals how ANC paid cadres and state employees R11 billion not to work, while the lockdown destroyed the private economy

9 August

Note to Editors: Please find attached an English soundbite by Dr. Leon Schreiber MP.

While the best available estimates show that over 3 million people in the private sector have already lost their jobs and that a fifth of private sector employees did not receive a salary in June as a result of the ANC lockdown crisis, the DA can exclusively reveal that at least 84 337 cadres and public servants were paid their full salaries during the lockdown to do nothing.

According to National Treasury, the average salary in the public service is R393 000 per annum, or R32 750 per month. This means that, over the past four months of the lockdown crisis, the ANC has spent over R11 billion in taxpayer money to pay the salaries of at least 84 000 state employees who “had their workloads reduced significantly.”

In response to a parliamentary question posed by the DA, Minister of Public Service and Administration, Senzo Mchunu, bluntly stated that “during the national lockdown, all public servants will continue to receive their full salaries” even if they are not doing any work.

Mchunu also provided a breakdown per government department of the over 84 000 employees who “had their workloads reduced significantly” during levels 4 and 5 of the lockdown.

To understand the full scale of the ANC’s determination to keep feeding its public sector patronage network, consider that the R11 billion wasted over the past four months on state employees who were not working is equivalent to 15.7% of the $4.3 billion that the government was recently forced to borrow from the IMF.

While the national government and all ANC-controlled provinces happily wasted precious public funds to pay workers for not working, and while millions of private sector employees lost all they had, only the DA-led Western Cape immediately put in place systems to ensure that almost all public servants continued earning their salaries throughout the lockdown.

The DA salutes the Western Cape Government for once again proving that is a responsible custodian of taxpayer money.

The DA will be writing to Mchunu to find out why the government did not require “non-essential” public servants to claim from the UIF-TERS system in the same way that it forced private employees to surrender their salaries.

If the government was confident that TERS would adequately compensate workers for lost income, why did it refuse to make non-essential cadres give up their salaries and also claim from TERS like private sector workers?

It is nothing short of a national scandal that the ANC willfully destroyed the livelihoods of at least three million private sector workers, but at the same made sure that state employees who were not doing any work at all continued to receive full pay and benefits.

Issued by Leon Schreiber, DA Shadow Minister for Public Service and Administration, 9 August 2020