Ramaphosa forces you to pay the water and electricity bills of ANC cadres

9 October 2022

Amidst rolling electricity blackouts across the country and widespread water-shedding in Gauteng, the DA can today reveal that President Cyril Ramaphosa has recently introduced a new provision to the Ministerial Handbook that enables his Ministers and Deputy Ministers to use unlimited amounts of taxpayer money to settle water and electricity bills at their official residences.

As if to kick South Africans while we are down, Ramaphosa is forcing the people of this country to pay the costs of providing electricity and water services to the very ministers who have robbed citizens of reliable access to these same services.

In the latest version of the Ministerial Handbook, published on 13 April 2022, Ramaphosa has scrapped the provision that previously capped the amount of money that taxpayers would pay for water and electricity at official ministerial residences at R5 000 per month per house.

Each of Ramaphosa’s 28 Ministers and 35 Deputy Ministers are entitled to two taxpayer-funded official residences: one in Pretoria and one in Cape Town.

In terms of Ramaphosa’s new handout to his fellow cadres, taxpayers will now be forced to pay for every drop of water and every watt of electricity used at these 126 official residences.

Given the voracious appetites of ANC cadres, the annual cost to taxpayers of this handout to the rich is likely to run into tens of millions of Rands.

While the cost of electricity for ordinary South Africans has increased by 356% over the past decade, with Eskom already demanding a further catastrophic 32% increase next year, Ramaphosa’s new freebie to his Poverty Cabinet will see taxpayers now also paying the electricity bills of ANC cadres like Patricia de Lille, Bheki Cele and Fikile Mbalula.

And while residents of Gauteng’s biggest cities no longer have water to drink, these same suffering residents will now have to fork out extra every month to pay the water bills of the multimillionaires like Lindiwe Sisulu, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Gwede Mantashe.

Ramaphosa’s decision to force taxpayers to pay the water and electricity bills of his Poverty Cabinet comes after revelations that Patrica de Lille’s Department of Public Works previously spent R2.6 million to buy generators for ministerial homes despite the fact that the Bryntirion Estate in Pretoria, where many ministerial homes are located, is already exempt from the load shedding that the rest of South Africa suffers under.

In addition to making South Africans pay the water and electricity bills of Ministers and Deputy Ministers, Ramaphosa has also apparently moved to implement Pule Mabe’s corrupt plan to force taxpayers to pay the salaries of ANC staff that the bankrupt ANC can no longer afford.

Ramaphosa has introduced a new provision in the Ministerial Handbook that enables the Minister of Public Service and Administration to approve the appointment of an unlimited number of cadres in the offices of Ministers and Deputy Ministers. At the same time, the President has dramatically increased the salary levels of cadres employed as “administrative support staff” in ministerial offices, from R850 000 to R1.15 million per year.

At a time when our country is in an outright nosedive, with millions of South Africans having lost access to even the most basic supplies of electricity and water, it is profoundly insulting for an out-of-touch BEE-billionaire President to force citizens to pay the water and electricity bills of his fellow filthy rich ANC cadres.

This insult is further aggravated by what is apparently an effort by Ramaphosa to force taxpayers to pay million Rand salaries for ANC staff members that his financial and morally bankrupt party can no longer afford to pay.

As the only party that cares about the plight of suffering South Africans, the DA will take urgent action against this abuse of public funds by formally demanding that Ramaphosa scraps these outrageous provisions in the new Ministerial Handbook.

Issued by Leon Schreiber, DA Shadow Minister for Public Service and Administration, 9 October 2022