The Democratic Alliance (DA) has written to Presidency Director General Frank Chikane, asking him what progress has been made in updating the draft presidential handbook following Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s recent multimillion-rand flight to the United Kingdom in a hired Swiss jet.
Flying Mlambo-Ngcuka to the UK cost taxpayers an estimated R4,55-million, the Defence Ministry said on Saturday. This was ”irregular and way out of proportion with reasonable standards”, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said in a statement.
The plane had been hired by someone in the Department of Defence without authorisation from the ministry, the secretary for defence or the acting chief of the South African National Defence Force.
DA MP Gareth Morgan noted in a statement on Monday that the Public Protector had in August made the recommendation that issues of travel by members of the Presidency should be incorporated into the handbook and discussed by the Cabinet ”as a matter of urgency”.
Morgan noted that after last year’s holiday trip by the deputy president to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, he had written to the Public Protector to request an investigation.
The protector had then found that the deputy president had not acted improperly, but he acknowledged that there was a need to tighten up the way in which the Presidency made travel arrangements — including that the secretary of the Cabinet take urgent steps to ensure that the handbook dealt with these matters.
Morgan said: ”However, this latest incident brings attention back to the fact that the deputy president has made a habit of embarking on expensive overseas travel, sometimes for holiday purposes, at the expense of the taxpayer.”
This was the deputy president’s third brush with travel-expense controversy following her trip to the United Arab Emirates and a R75 000 flight to a golf tournament in Sun City earlier this year, ”which lasted all of 13 minutes”, noted Morgan.
Meanwhile, Freedom Front Plus MP Pieter Groenewald welcomed Lekota’s announcement that a board of inquiry would investigate the costs of the UK flight.
Groenewald said, in a statement, that the fact that there were not enough pilots available in South Africa to fly the South African Air Force’s presidential jets ”is just further proof of the total collapse experienced by the air force as a result of government’s affirmative action and transformation policies”.
He noted that his party asked Lekota last year in Parliament about the number of black pilots trained to fly the presidential jets ”and was assured by the minister that there was one qualified pilot and a further four in training. It is, however, not known how many of the pilots in training completed successfully since last year.” — I-Net Bridge, Sapa