EDITORIAL | Only the ANC would have the gall to ask the public for money

Who would have thought it would come to this?

A governing party so broke that it has been forced to resort to asking Joe Public help pay its staff salaries – this is what the ANC has become.

The party this past weekend launched a crowdfunding campaign, asking its members and the public for donations so that it can pay staff salaries because it is broke.

Sure, the red flags have always been there, what with the Sunday Times and other media reporting over the years about the ANC’s failure to pay its employees’ salaries on the set date.

But matters came to head this year when the ANC failed to pay its staff at all over the months of July and August, simply because it had nothing in its bank account.

The coffers went empty after tax authority Sars garnisheed the ANC’s allowances from the IEC, which run to millions of rand given the size of representation in parliament, over unpaid tax deductions to the tune of R80m.

As if it were a con man, it turned out the ANC deducted pay-as-you-earn from its employees but failed to pass it on to Sars as per requirements of the tax laws.

How the ANC has treated its staff is further evidence of how its leaders are also unfit to rule and a danger to the people of this country and its future prospects.

It did the same with deductions of pension contributions and, it also emerged last week, UIF, meaning that if the unpaid ANC workers should be retrenched tomorrow, they would not be eligible to claim UIF.

It’s mind boggling stuff!

All this points to a ruling party led by people who simply have no regard for the wellbeing of just a few hundred employees, yet they want to be trusted with the running of a country and its more than trillion-rand budget.

How the ANC has treated its staff is further evidence of how its leaders are also unfit to rule and a danger to the people of this country and its future prospects.

It’s also evidence of why, year after year, the auditor-general paints a grim picture of the state of public finance management by national, provincial and government departments as well as municipalities.

This year alone, only 27 out of 257 municipalities achieved clean audits and very few of these are under ANC rule.

It’s a trend for ANC cadres who start off their careers at Luthuli House, where there’s flagrant disregard for rules, to be deployed to the state, hence the shambolic state of public finances.

It is time for ANC leaders to have a serious look at themselves in the mirror before they ask the public for donations to fund their own operations.

In fact, the public has been indirectly donating to the ANC via the tax-funded IEC and other parliamentary allowances but it messed all that up when it was garnisheed by Sars because it considered itself untouchable as a party in power.