Public Service and Administration Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s office has defended her refusal to move into the department’s dilapidated headquarters building in the Pretoria CBD.
Sisuluwas shifted from defence to the public administration portfolio after President Jacob Zuma’s most recent cabinet reshuffle in June. But since her appointment, Sisulu has not set foot in her department’s headquarters - Batho Pele House - choosing instead to set up shop in a building leased by the State Information Technology Agency (Sita).
“We are not going to Batho Pele House. That building has massive structural problems”, Sisulu’s spokesman, Ndivhowo Mabaya, told Independent Newspapers on Sunday.
He said the move was prompted by a lack of space at Batho Pele, which he said was designed to accommodate about 300 people, but was currently filled with about 600 public service and administration officials.
This lack of space, he explained, was exacerbated by the fact that staff who had worked for the late minister Roy Padayachie - who passed away unexpectedly in May - were still being accommodated in the building.
Since ministers generally take a whole range of officials with them when they move from one portfolio to another, this has effectively left the public service ministry with a duplicate staff complement - those who worked for Padayachie and those who followed Sisulu to her new position.
Asked how the minister could expect other staff to continue working in the building, Mabaya explained that the Department of Public Works was in the process of looking for new accommodation for all public service and administration staff. The Batho Pele building was first leased by the Department of Public Works in February 2006, but this lease expired at the end of November and has been renewed on a monthly basis while Public Works tried to find an alternative building.
Mabaya also noted that when the previous tenants - the Department of Trade and Industry - moved out of Batho Pele House at the end of 2005, they left a “damning report by the departments of Labour and Public Works” on the state of the building. - Political Bureau