Peter Dickson
Just two months before the election, Eastern Cape chiefs, whose influential vote is the hotly contested key to victory for the African National Congress or the United Democratic Movement in the densely populated rural Transkei, have been given a massive salary increase that will cost taxpayers R30-million a year.
Eastern Cape Premier Makhenkesi Stofile dismissed UDM provincial leader Chief Dumisani Gwadiso’s accusation of “desperate” ANC vote buying, since, according to Gwadiso, “more than 90%” of chiefs – and consequently their subjects – support the UDM. Stofile said President Nelson Mandela had yet to sign the Bill that would implement the increase.
Stofile said Mandela had consented unofficially to the pay hike, which only applies to Eastern Cape traditional leaders and pays out for the first time on April 30, but the president will not backdate it to July last year as announced by Eastern Cape MEC for Finance and Economic Affairs Enoch Godongwana.
But that’s not what Bisho’s spin doctors are saying. The Eastern Cape’s finance and local government departments said two weeks ago that the increase was a foregone “legal requirement” in terms of legislation apparently passed last year. Eastern Cape local government department representative Litha Twaku, rejecting any link to political motives, said the increase is provided for in the Reconnection of Traditional Leaders Act.
Economic affairs and finance representative Mzi Zenzile said the increase was a simple, legally required implementation of national policy. Twaku and Zenzile said that, effective from April, the six paramount chiefs will be paid R322 800 a year and the 180 Transkei and 41 Ciskei chiefs will each receive R77 472 a year.
But Stofile surprisingly made no mention of this when he opened this year’s sitting of the troubled Eastern Cape House of Traditional Leaders in February and accused some of the chiefs of stoking violence in the Transkei.
The chiefs, authorities in a region where tribal organisation is still strong, have been agitating for two years on the pay issue and on demands for official restoration of royal status to the six Xhosa paramount chiefs, the slow process of land reform, and the erosion of their traditional powers by what they see as hostile transitional local councils dominated by the ANC.
In a powerful message to the government last year, some Transkei chiefs chased Independent Electoral Commission volunteers out of their areas during voter registration sessions, voicing their anger at not being drawn into the process of registering their subjects.
But also, as pointed out by a counsellor for the Xhosa royal house, many subjects did not register because their post-apartheid expectations had been dashed in an impoverished region of historical neglect. The timing of the salary increase begs the question of politically expedient vote buying, but its implementation doesn’t extend too far down the royal food chain.
About 950 Transkei headmen, receiving between R859 and R1 063 a month in terms of the bantustan-era Territorial Treaties Act still in force, will continue to be paid this rate for their literal lip service.