Come Mangaung, President Jacob Zuma will have a throne to call his own. His executive toilet trailer will feature a porcelain basin, vanity mirror, interior lighting, hand towels and soap dispenser. It may even have a marble counter top.
Most importantly, it will have two-ply toilet paper and hot and cold running water .
“I’ve supplied my executive toilets for the president and deputy president, and Julius Malema, many times,” said Bruce Johnson of Elite Sanitation Solutions. “The president will be allocated his own trailer and have major security around it.”
Johnson, who provided sanitation and hygiene services to the ANC’s Polokwane conference, offers unique touches in his executive toilet trailers: a vase of flowers, a red carpet, light music or pot plants placed outside.
“The ANC never asks for anything like that. They take the toilets as they are,” he said.
Murray van Zyl, of Prestige Toilet Hire, said his firm, which also provided ablution facilities to the ANC conference in Polokwane and has several presidential inaugurations under its belt, said hiring luxury trailers costs around R2 000 a day. Its bid for this year’s conference was unsuccessful.
For an event the size of Mangaung, there would need to be several hundred portable loos, not counting the VIP loos.
Geo’s Toilet Hire is understood to be supplying VIP mobile toilets to Mangaung, but was not available for comment yesterday.
Sanitech, another big portable toilet outfit, bid for the contract, offering the ANC 47 executive trailer units and 300 plastic units.
“Our base covered close on 5 500 people. The rest is from other companies,” said an employee who did not want to be named. “We requested a 50 percent deposit and the balance before we left for Mangaung. But they didn’t want to pay.
“It’s an awesome contract but we weren’t prepared to do the job. It’s a nice prestigious event to have your name to, but when it comes to waiting to get paid, it’s not worth it,” the employee stated.
Independent on Saturday