Cape Town - The Western Cape government has racked up just over R13 million a year in legal fees for the past four years.
The figure includes legal opinions and litigation fees across 13 departments, as well as costs related to rationalisation, drafting and the quality control of provincial legislation.
This was revealed during a response by Western Cape Premier Helen Zille to questions by ANC leader in the provincial legislature Lynne Brown who wanted a run-down on the provincial government’s expenditure on legal matters during the past four years.
Legal spending in the provincial government has been approximately R13m every year since 2009, except 2011/12 when it was moderately higher. And the legal costs for the 2012/13 financial year stand at R13.2m.
Zille pointed out the Western Cape government spent far less than most provincial governments and national government departments on legal fees.
Quoting media reports, she said the Eastern Cape government spent nearly R50m in the 2012/13 financial year on private law firms.
She said the North West government paid more than R13m to one law firm to conduct a single disciplinary hearing before the hearing actually took place.
Zille said that as a rule legal opinions were prepared internally and external opinions were only sourced in circumstances where the Chief Directorate: Legal Services lacked the capacity or where specialised expertise was required.
She said that during April 2011 to the end of March 2013, 50 legal opinions were sourced externally on behalf of Western Cape departments, “which meant 97.2 percent of all requests for legal advice or opinions were dealt with internally by Legal Services between April 1, 2011, and March 31, 2013”.
After studying Zille’s response, Brown said she thought the premier was “running government through law firms”.
“If the long list of legal matters provided during the response constitutes only 3 percent of outsourced work, then I shudder to think what the 97 percent done in-house entails.”
Brown was not impressed with what she called the “premier’s attempts to hide what is wrong in the Western Cape by comparing it to other provinces”.
“The premier must stop deflecting provincial issues by comparing it to other provinces. She runs this province and we hold her accountable for what happens here,” Brown added.
Cape Argus