The DA has called for Gauteng Community Safety MEC Sizakele Nkosi-Malobane to be “grilled” over her admission that she used taxpayers’ money to treat prisoners to KFC.
DA Gauteng spokesperson for community safety Michele Clarke said they would be submitting questions to the Gauteng legislature to probe the splurge. If it was regarded as wasteful expenditure they would report the matter to the auditor-general, she said.
On Monday, the MEC defended her decision to splash out about R63 800 to treat offenders and other people attending her department’s event at Leeuwkop Prison near Sandton to a KFC meal.
She argued they would have been charged “an arm and a leg by caterers” had they considered them.
The MEC was photographed handing out KFC’s Streetwise Twos to the convicts a week ago, during her department’s Get Out and Stay Out (Goso) programme.
It was attended by about 2 000 people including school pupils, prison warders, department stakeholders and more than 900 offenders, some of whom were convicted of raping women and children, according to Nkosi-Malobane.
Yesterday, Clarke described the expenditure as falling “outside of the department’s mandate”, and dismissed it as an attempt to “buy prisoners’ votes” ahead of the crucial elections in 2019.
Clarke said the department couldn’t manage to pay the provincial traffic police officers overtime, “yet it can manage to pay for fast food for convicted criminals”.
“This is a flagrant abuse of public funds. The MEC must be grilled for her actions in dishing out finger-licking food. The ANC in Gauteng is chickening out after they lost control of the province,” she said.
In an interview with The Star, Nkosi-Malobane expressed her preparedness to stop catering for the department’s programmes, but stressed she would not pull the plug on Goso, which had been running for the past two years.
It was aimed at equipping inmates with crucial skills to help them start a new life upon their release, and to discourage drug abuse and gangsterism among inmates.
@luyolomkentane