Cabinet ministers, their predecessors and MPs owe state R4m in rent: public works minister Dean Macpherson

Cabinet ministers, their predecessors and ordinary MPs owe the state about R4m in unpaid rent for their state provided homes.

“It is not sustainable,” said public works and infrastructure minister Dean Macpherson.

Macpherson also revealed that other government departments owed public works nearly R14bn. This was money owed for services rendered, including municipal services.

The department, known as the government landlord, manages accommodation for government departments and for MPs and members of the executive.

MacPherson’s spokesperson James de Villiers told TimesLIVE the R4m owed to the department was in terms of rental due and municipal services at homes provided either in Cape Town or Pretoria.

“In the case of MPs and former MPs, this is for rental and services in parliamentary parks,” he said.

De Villiers said Macpherson has handed over a report of debtors to the public works and infrastructure portfolio committee as the majority of money owed is for current and former MPs.

“The minister will be working with parliament and departments to recover the money owed to us. In the case of former members, we are considering handing these accounts over for debt recovery,” said De Villiers.

A full breakdown of MPs, past and present or cabinet ministers who owe rent has been provided to the portfolio committee at its request and it will be its decision whether to release the information.

De Villiers said the department could be in a position to release the names once those involved have been given adequate time to respond to the letters of demand sent to them.

During a question-and-answer session, Macpherson told MPs the department was paying R6bn a year on office leases for government departments.

“In my view that is an extraordinary amount of money considering the amount of buildings we own. We are looking at how do we bring departments back into government buildings, particularly those in the inner city, so that we are part of driving inner city regeneration,” he said.

Macpherson said he has set up working groups with the cities of Tshwane, eThekwini and Cape Town to identify these properties.

They have also noticed that government departments were quick to take up offices with sea views in suburban areas, instead of occupying those in the inner-city. He said the rented offices normally cost about R120 or more per square metre, while the government buildings charged about R26 per square metre.

“If we want to get into an A-grade office space, we need to put more money into uplifting those buildings than on leases.”

Macpherson, a DA MP who became a minister after the May elections led to the formation of a government of national unity, said the auditor-general identified weaknesses in his department that were significant and structural.

“We should not underestimate the scale of the problem we face in bringing this department into financial and operational viability. This is also not something that is going to be done quickly, but given a term in government, I believe we can bring the department and its entities into a full clean audit, coupled with a healthy financial outlook.”

Among the financial problems is an overdraft of more than R3bn. The property managing trading entity (PMTE) is technically bankrupt, he said.

Among the “bold” measures the department is implementing are:

• Ensuring that interim financial statements are produced and audited across the PMTE and all entities;
• Making tender systems transparent whereby they are open to the public, and they are recorded both in audio and visually;
• Reconfiguring the PMTE into a property trading entity that is able to generate revenue to be used in the building and maintaining of social infrastructure; and
• Partnering with Infrastructure South Africa to develop a model for infrastructure delivery by the department’s construction management division which will deal with projects with the most severe delays, so they can be completed.

TimesLIVE