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Johannesburg — The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) says it refuses to believe that President Jacob Zuma did not ask for state resources to be used to pay for upgrades at his Nkandla home.
The union welcomed the ruling by the Constitutional Court ordering Zuma to pay back a certain amount —to be determined by the National Treasury — for non-security upgrades at his home.
“Numsa has from the outset condemned all the looting and corruption in this massive over-spending of public money on one private home, by both government officials and the firms who got the contracts for the upgrades,” the union said.
“There can be absolutely no excuse for spending R246m for one person and his family — in particular the president of the ANC and South Africa — when, 20 years after our ‘democratic breakthrough’, four million Africans are crammed into one-roomed houses and more than 25 million Africans live in houses with less than three rooms.”
The union said it was not convinced that the people involved in the upgrade process believed that certain upgrades were security related.
“Numsa also refuses to accept that Zuma had neither asked nor been involved in this extreme abuse of state resources, or that he, or any of the others implicated genuinely believed that an amphitheatre, visitor’s centre, cattle kraal, chicken kraal and swimming pool were security upgrades.”
“While the union will back the call for them all to be brought to justice, we recognise the reality that this scandal is just an extreme example of a vast network of institutionalised corruption in both the public and private sector, rooted in a structurally corrupt system of white monopoly capitalism, funded by the super-exploitation of workers, whose labour creates the wealth of the rich.” — Sapa
Online Reporter