Tshwane municipal manager’s outrageous salary symptomatic of corrupt ANC

6 July 2016

A response to a parliamentary question posed by the Democratic Alliance's Nomsa Marchesi, has revealed that Tshwane’s municipal manager, Jason Ngobeni, is the country’s highest paid civil servant. His R3 million annual salary package is in fact higher than that of the President, Deputy President and Cabinet Ministers.  

Ngobeni’s outrageous salary is an insult to the people of Tshwane. Bloated salaries for officials in top positions is symptomatic of the corruption and inefficiency of the ANC in the City of Tshwane. 

Clearly the people of Tshwane are not getting value for money. A comparison with the DA-run City of Cape Town shows that while the Tshwane municipal manager was paid 93c per member of the Tshwane population, the Cape Town manager earned just 57c per member of the population and almost R800,000 a year less in terms of total gross salary.

While the ANC leadership in Tshwane receive huge salaries, these indicators illustrate that they have not put the people of Tshwane above their own interests:

- Unemployment is up from 24.2% in the 2011 to 26% in the latest quarterly labour force survey. In total 517,000 people in Tshwane do not have jobs or have given up looking.

- According to the Non-financial Census of Municipalities, Tshwane has more people than any other metro that have to go more than 200m to reach a water point with 113,212 consumer units receiving water provision at a distance – for the DA-run Cape Town, that number is zero. 

- According to the General Household Survey, Tshwane has the lowest percentage of households with access to a basic sanitation facility at 82% in comparison to 91.4% in Cape Town.

- For the past five years, Tshwane has not received a clean audit. Last year R1.88 billion was lost to financial misconduct according to Auditor General through unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure.

The indicators above point to the corruption and mismanagement of the Capital, which has been caught in an ANC-spun web of corruption from which it is struggling to escape. 

This City needs change. Change for the people of Tshwane. Replacing Mayor Ramokgopa with Thoko Didiza will not bring this change that the City needs to move forward again, because Didiza is cut from the same cloth as those in the ANC spinning a web of corruption and cronyism in Tshwane.

Moreover, the bloated and overpaid ANC government she will inherit will suffer from the same problems that have prevented the Capital from making progress over the past 5 years.

The truth is that the people of Tshwane will only find the change they deserve in an honest and responsive DA government that will stop corruption, deliver better services and create jobs. 

This is the change the DA wants to bring to Tshwane in order to see if move forward again. On August 3 together we can bring change to Tshwane.

Issued by Jacques de Villiers, Press Officer, 6 July 2016