Recouping R14.5bn owed to the department of public works by other departments as well as dealing with 384 hijacked buildings are some of the priorities on the list of minister Dean Macpherson.
Having recently visited a hijacked police station in Carletonville as part of his operation to restore hijacked state buildings, Macpherson - minister of public works and infrastructure - stated that some of the challenges included the involvement of officials who rented out these buildings or allowed such matters to take place.
Speaking on the sidelines of the DA federal congress in Midrand on Sunday, Macpherson said he had recently gone to Carletonville to see a police station that had been hijacked. He said when he got a tip-off about the hijacked building, he thought it was a joke.
“I thought that was impossible, to be honest, because how do you hijack a police station? And so we went there and what I saw was quite unbelievable. For 20 years that situation had been allowed to exist. It showed me that officials had stopped being interested, and then decay and collapse had set in,” which highlighted collusion between officials and renters, he said.
According to Macpherson, there are 384 hijacked buildings or illegally occupied pieces of land in SA. Fixing that would not be an overnight situation, he said. “And so we have to go to court. We have to go through that process to get those back.”
“And sometimes that’s unpopular.
“Why that building was hijacked in Carletonville is because there’s been a breakdown in the rule of law.”
He added that it was a waste of resources when the state paid for sites to be protected and they were still invaded, questioning how that happened when there were security guards stationed to guard them.
“And then, even then, they’re still being invaded. Now you’ve got to go to court and get them off and that sometimes costs millions of rand. And that is a strange thing that baffles me.
“How is it that we pay to secure these properties and they still get invaded? That speaks to the competency of the people that we appoint,” Macpherson said.
Referring to a parliament presentation by the SAPS which revealed that prison escapes were linked to infrastructure issues, Macpherson said it was a two-way street when it came to maintaining state buildings.
“There are departments that owe billions and billions of rand. And they want us to keep maintaining and improving (the buildings) and not pay. That’s not how it works in the real world. If you don’t pay, you don’t get a service,” he said.
“Now I can’t go and throw out prisoners from a correctional facility, but we have been clear that we are not going to be a piggy bank for other departments to not pay us so that they can spend money on other things and then we have to pick up those pieces.”
He said his department is owed R14.5bn, a debt bigger than its annual budget.
Macpherson said the department should run like a business to survive and charge for services it provides.
“We are owed R14.5bn. My budget every year is R7.5bn. I am owed twice the amount of money in my annual budget. How do you run a department? If your business was owed twice your annual operating budget, you would have been liquidated. You would have shut down and ceased to exist. Now, I don’t want to do that. I want to turn it around,” he said.
Sowetan
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.