Africa-Press – South-Africa. The ANC’s secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, wants to know why the ANC-led government is spending money on statues and football teams when people are suffering.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the local government intervention workshop in Birchwood on Tuesday, Mbalula said he needed help in understanding why local governments did not properly use state resources to uplift communities.
He said: “Comrades, why do you spend the money of the municipality when it is impoverished on sponsoring teams? From the point of PR and image, you just portray the ANC as a government that just doesn’t care.”
News24 previously reported that the Msunduzi municipality, led by the ANC, announced their ambitions to sponsor a football club, Royal AM, to the tune of R27 million.
This was despite residents complaining to President Cyril Ramaphosa about hunger, crime and unemployment during his recent visit to the area.
Touching on this, and including the Nelson Mandela statue in the Eastern Cape, Mbalula said: “Many statues (are erected) every day – a municipality [builds a] Mandela statue. These statues are expensive. Why do you prioritise Mandela’s statues? Mandela has got many statues.
“We have, in fact, built a Nelson Mandela statue in the Union Buildings? And so, every council, when they run out of ideas, they produce a statue.
“We must be reminded by social media and our critics that we are doing something wrong. We can’t. We must stop ourselves; we are in charge. We can’t complain to somebody else; we are in charge.”
He added that he failed to understand the reasoning.
He said the intervention workshop would focus on holding ANC officials accountable by addressing mismanagement in municipalities.
“This workshop assists us to say it cannot be business as usual. That shouldn’t be happening where we govern.
“It is not a workshop where we strategise about the last five years; no, that work has been done. We know where the problem is.
The Auditor-General tells a story about where the problem is. Our own research and stories are telling us where the problem is.”
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