LISTEN | Pay our salaries and pensions or we’ll take criminal action, say ANC staff

ANC employees have threatened the party’s top six officials, who include President Cyril Ramaphosa, with criminal action over the failure to pay their pension benefits to fund administrators despite making deductions from their salaries over two years.

The disgruntled staff members made the threat of opening fraud and theft cases against the ANC and its leaders at their meeting with Ramaphosa and other ANC top six officials on Monday.

The ANC workers also met with the party’s most senior office bearers to register their unhappiness with the delay in payment and at times nonpayment of their salaries, which has deteriorated in the past few months.

By midday on Wednesday, staff had not received their salaries for June and it was likely the same would happen with salaries this month as the ANC barely has enough money to fund its operations.

The Sunday Times in May reported that the SA Revenue Service had garnisheed the ANC's bank account over a tax debt of R80m and that families of its deceased staff members were left in the lurch as they were yet to receive pension and death benefit payouts, months after burying loved ones.

Those who attended the meeting with Ramaphosa and top six members said staff were told to take up their labour-related grievances with the management at Luthuli House.

They were also told to meet management this week to hear a presentation on a plan the party is proposing to resolve the pay standoff.

Staff responded by giving the top six until the end of July to pay their outstanding salaries, make sure medical payments were up to date and, most importantly, clear all the pension and provident fund arrears.

ANC staff representative Mvusi Mdala said the nonpayment of retirement benefit contributions into their pension fund, while being deducted from their salaries, constituted a criminal offence.

Mdala said they would first approach the CCMA over the matter, before going to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) should it not be resolved by the end of July.

“We are not going to back down on that; we are taking it very seriously. We have given the leadership of the ANC until the end of July to pay up. Failing to do that, we’ve got other options. One is to take it to the ombudsman and then the other option — because when you don’t pay provident fund because they deduct money from us and they don’t pay it —  that’s a criminal offence,” Mdala said.

“Then the other option we might consider is to approach the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), if we are not getting joy at the ombudsman or the CCMA.

“Those are the first options we’re going to [consider]. But also, those are subject to the plan that the leadership is having, but our deadline on the provident fund is July 31.”

Asked who they would be seeking to prosecute should they end up taking that option, Mdala said it would be against “those who are responsible to pay provident funds. The employer is responsible to pay provident funds.”

“Since November 2018 to date, they are not paying it to the provident fund. No-one tells us where that money they are deducting from us is going,” he said.

It has also emerged that the issue of nonpayment of salaries was raised at the most recent meeting of the ANC's national executive committee.

Sunday Times Daily has heard an audio clip leaked from that meeting, in which ANC KwaZulu-Natal provincial secretary Mdumiseni Ntuli criticises the ANC top six for its handling of the plight of staff.

Listen to the audio: 

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“I would have expected by now that given the challenges we are all familiar with, there would have been at least an engagement between the national officials, the secretaries and chairpersons of provinces who are equally premiers of these provinces, to sit together and say how do we deal with the problem of finances,” he said.

Ntuli said it was not clear whether the party had a plan.

“When you come to an NEC meeting, besides that there is no report on the state of finances, I also get a sense that there is no plan or a strategy to deal with this problem.”

He said the issue of the finances of the ANC should not be a treasurer-general issue, as it is not a provincial treasurer issue in provinces, but “an issue of leadership”.