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The Democratic Alliance said that while it's estimated that more than 3-million people in the private sector have lost their jobs during the Covid-19 lockdown, “cadres” and public servants received their full salaries.
DA MP, Dr. Leon Schreiber, said this was confirmed by the Minister of Public Service and Administration, Senzo Mchunu, in a reply to a parliamentary question.
He said 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,” Schreiber said.
He said this was “equivalent to 15.7% of the $4.3 billion that the government was recently forced to borrow from the IMF.”
Schreiber said that the DA would be writing to Minister 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.
“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,” he said.
