The Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public Office Bearers has dropped a bombshell recommendation of a 4,1 percent salary increase for public office bearers, effectively gifting the President an extra R137 000 next year. While the gesture may appear routine in the corridors of power, it detonates like a grenade in households where mothers dilute baby formula to stretch another day and grandmothers skip meals so grandchildren can eat.
This proposed windfall, published quietly in a government gazette, would push Cyril Ramaphosa’s annual package to approximately R3,4 million, while his Deputy pockets an additional R130 000 to breach the R3,1 million mark. Cabinet Ministers would glide past R2,8 million and their deputies would cross R2,3 million, all at a moment when the nation’s economic arteries are haemorrhaging. The timing is so callous it feels choreographed to mock the 30 million South Africans who are literally choosing between rent and food.
“Nobody knows what deputy ministers do, including themselves.”
— ActionSA MP Alan Beesley
Rake In Millions While Families Go Hungry
Statistics South Africa’s latest figures show that 50 percent of families in our country are going to bed hungry over this festive period, a damning indictment that should freeze any politician’s hand before signing a lavish top-up. Yet the commission’s recommendation glides over this humanitarian cliff, proving that the ivory tower of Union Buildings has become soundproof to the growl of empty stomachs.
High interest rates, stagnant wages and unstable employment have turned low-income neighbourhoods into debt colonies where loan sharks patrol school gates and pawnshops replace grocery stores. In this landscape, an extra R137 000 for the President is not merely an accounting entry, it is a moral obscenity that tells the poor their pain is negotiable while elite comfort is non-negotiable.
| Office | Current Salary | Proposed Increase | New Package |
|---|---|---|---|
| President | R3 263 000 | R137 000 | R3 400 000 |
| Deputy President | R2 970 000 | R130 000 | R3 100 000 |
| Cabinet Minister | R2 690 000 | R110 000 | R2 800 000 |
| Deputy Minister | R2 210 000 | R90 000 | R2 300 000 |
ActionSA Slams Salary Gravy Train
ActionSA has seized the moment to table a Private Members’ Bill that seeks to abolish the entire tier of Deputy Ministers, branding their posts as ghost jobs that bleed the fiscus for zero discernible output. The party’s MP Alan Beesley did not mince words, labelling the proposed increase unacceptable and inappropriate because office bearers were delivering very little that they are meant to serve.
Beesley’s assertion that even the occupants of these offices cannot define their daily duties cuts to the heart of a bloated bureaucracy that expands salaries faster than it expands service delivery. When half the nation faces empty plates, the spectacle of Deputy Ministers collecting R2,3 million for mystery work becomes a hate symbol that fuels voter cynicism and invites social unrest.
Salary Surge Exposes Intelligence Collapse Amid Crime Tsunami
While the commission cheerfully tallies extra thousands for the presidency, South Africa has just been crowned the second-most criminal nation on the continent, with an Organised Crime Index score of 7,43 that leaves the Democratic Republic of the Congo breathing down our necks. The state’s intelligence services, bled dry by political interference and corruption exposed by the still-sitting Madlanga Commission, have become invisible when 6 400 murders are recorded in only three months and ransomware cartels loot 3,4 percent of GDP through online fraud. Citizens now face heavily armed gangs who run Cape Town neighbourhoods like mini-states, yet the same ministers who failed to foresee or forestall this anarchy are first in line for a six-figure top-up.
The bitter irony is that the Madlanga Commission’s interim report, handed to the President on 17 December, already warns that criminal networks have infiltrated the very justice machinery meant to smash them, making the proposed salary increases a reward for catastrophic failure. When kidnappings, abalone smuggling and digital extortion flourish under the noses of multi-million-rand office bearers, the 4,1 percent hike feels less like remuneration and more like danger pay for overseeing a national security collapse.
Must Reject Insult To Injured Electorate
The commission’s recommendation is not yet law, it awaits the signature of the very people who stand to benefit, creating a conflict of interest so glaring it would be laughable if it were not lethal. Should Parliament approve this increase, it will broadcast a message that South Africa’s political class has officially entered the realm of aristocracy, immune to the austerity they preach to nurses, teachers and social-grant recipients.
Rejecting the hike is the only path left for public office bearers who still claim to serve rather than rule. Anything less will cement the perception that the state has become a self-licking ice-cream cone, gorging itself while the rest of the nation scrapes the bowl, and that perception is the kindling that ignites revolutions.
