What exactly do SA’s traditional leaders do that is of value and why are we still paying them? We have eight kings, one queen, plus more than five-thousand chiefs, “headmen” and other minor “royals” traipsing around the country and being paid millions in taxpayers’ money. What, pray tell, are they for? Who do they account to?
Except for the Zulu king and his skins, and the Balobedu queen and her matrilineality, these “royals” aren’t even decorative. You don’t see Kenyan or American tourists flocking to see them in their traditional glory (that’s because many of these leaders are too busy flitting about in their government-bought Mercedes Benzes). These tourists wouldn’t want to look at most of these royals even if you offered them money to do so. Would you want to go and check out the violent King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo of the AbaThembu? Exactly.
Over the past year SA has been entertained and appalled as, after the death of King Goodwill Zwelithini in March 2021, a struggle to succeed him has unfolded. In those seventeen months we have seen a parade of many of the children of the king, some of his wives and other relatives claim their “right” to the throne. Though Misuzulu Sinqobile kaZwelithini has finally been crowned, rumblings and multimillion-rand court challenges remain.
What surprises me is just how this circus has unfolded without anyone in our constitutional democracy asking some pointed questions about the usefulness of this “institution”. No-one is saying: “Hello, that’s taxpayers’ money being wasted.”
No-one on what remains of the Left in SA is asking: why is a class of unelected, rich, indolent individuals being subsidised by the working class? The silence from the SA Communist Party, from the trade union federations Cosatu and many others, is quite incredible. Or maybe they don’t really stand for the working classes?
Why should you be paying a huge chunk of your taxes to yet another leech whose only claim to fame is that he is the spawn of this or that person? It doesn’t make sense. It’s a monumental waste of money.
The silence from so-called representatives of the poor — from Azapo to the EFF — has been deafening. These organisations, whose leaders are very happy to claim that their aim is to fight for the rights of the poor, have not said a word in these past few years to point out the sheer idiocy of taxpayers forking out billions of rand per year to feed these unelected, useless, no-work, patriarchal, upper-class leeches.
I am sure you’ve worked this out by now: I am a republican, a democrat. I don’t understand why the toiling masses, the taxpaying workers, must subsidise a class of leeches whose only claim to fame is that they are the descendant of this or that king, queen, chief or “headman”. Over the past 28 years we have dutifully doled out cash to these unelected, unaccountable, “leaders”. These rich, privileged, unelected people get a massive social grant from us while we refuse to give a basic income grant to the poor. What’s wrong with us? It is time for a review.
These are not feudal times, so I am not by any chance screaming “off with their heads”. All I am saying is, given the state of many municipalities in SA, your local councillor — who you elected on November 1 last year — is probably a lazy, corrupt, leech who listens to his party’s headquarters more than he listens to those who voted for him. Why should you be paying a huge chunk of your taxes to yet another leech whose only claim to fame is that he is the spawn of this or that person? It doesn’t make sense. It’s a monumental waste of money. It’s a double tax on ordinary, working South Africans who are already suffering from our hard economic times.
One would think people who realise they are unelected and unrepresentative would at least behave in a manner that endears them to the people who pay their salaries. Not some of these traditional leaders. Take again our good friend King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo down in the Eastern Cape. After serving time for kidnapping, assault and setting fire to the houses of some of his poor subjects, he returned home only to reportedly chase one of his children through the palace while wielding an axe.
Yes, we pay his salary R1.2m salary. This year the Zulu royal household has been allocated a staggering R67,316,000 for “the necessary work that is led by his majesty the king”, according to outgoing premier Sihle Zikalala. Necessary? I would rather the work was done by elected people like Zikalala. You see, Zikalala must account to the people.
Do the arithmetic. If the KZN government is paying the household of an unelected person R67m for just this year, think of the cascade of similar budgets across the country for thousands of these unelected leaders.
It is time SA got rid of the bloodsucking leeches claiming to be kings, queens and “headmen”. They must find themselves jobs like the rest of us.
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