South African Govt’s Expenses for Geneva Junket Under Fire

One day after Eskom’s soaring debt was disclosed to the public and the same week that unemployment figures reached record highs, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government has come under fire for spending R100,000 for each of 35 delegates to attend an International Labour Organisation meeting in Geneva in June.

In a statement today, the DA said R3.5 million had been spent on a 12-day junket for 35 delegates to accompany Ramaphosa to Geneva. It was earlier stated that the delegation consisted of 62 people, although the statement did not clarify who paid for the other 27 people.

“The average cost per delegate was almost an astronomical R100,000,” the DA said, “and if no tangible solutions to solve joblessness come from this trip to Geneva it would have been nothing more than a luxury vacation to one of the world’s most expensive cities and a colossal waste of public money. It is an indictment on the newly appointed Minister of Employment and Labour who apparently approved the expenditure.”

Answering a question from the Democratic Alliance in parliament this week, Employment and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi confirmed that there were 62 accredited delegates to the ILO conference, which cost his department at least R3.5m.

The DA said it would write to Nxesi to request a full, detailed report on whether the objectives of the trip were achieved. It wanted a breakdown of costs for each of the delegates; what they achieved and how they contributed; and how the department would be implementing the lessons learned from the trip to help the 10.2 million unemployed South Africans.

In a report in Business Day yesterday, Nxesi said his department would review its policy regarding the composition and costs of overseas delegations with a view to containing and cutting costs.