ANC to picket ANC, over ANC’s cash flow woes

The ANC’s staff members will be picketing outside Luthuli House, and other regional and provincial party offices, next Tuesday.

This comes after several months of the party being unable to pay staff their full salaries or pay salaries on time. It has also been reported that during the party’s national executive committee meeting last month that the party had mulled reducing its staff complement by half.

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The party released a statement on Wednesday afternoon, declaring that party staff’s grievances over their employment conditions had reached “critical point”.

The party’s spokesperson, Pule Mabe, says staff have now given notice of their intention to embark on industrial action, despite being informed that the organisation is attending to its “cash flow challenges”.

The party will appoint elected officials to receive the staff’s memoranda at the various picket points, Mabe said.

ANC staff plan to picket outside their employers’ offices countrywide, after yet another failure to pay their salaries.

The ANC’s cash flow problems have been an ongoing concern, with staff members complaining for months over not receiving their salaries on time.

There have also been questions over whether the party will face any sanctions for alleged tax fraud, after it allegedly deducted Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) tax from employees’ salaries without paying this over to the South African Revenue Service (Sars).

ALSO READ: Will ANC account for alleged tax fraud linked to employee salaries?

Reports in May suggested that the cash-strapped party had an R80 million tax bill when Paul Mashatile took over as treasurer-general in December 2017, and that the party reportedly owed a further R140 million in provident-fund debt.

At the time it was believed the party had owed at least R17 million in PAYE tax deductions, which Sars’ recovered by garnishing the R17 million allocated to the ANC by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) for the first quarter of 2021-2022 as partial payment of its debt.

It is unclear how many staff members will participate in the upcoming pickets, or what the details of the latest salary dispute entail.