Bathabile Dlamini NEC

R11 000 a night minister launches scathing political attack on DA

Minister for Social Development, Bathabile Dlamini, who recently spent an alleged R 11 000 for a one night stay at The Oyster Box Hotel in Durban, was supposedly misrepresented by the DA when they claimed she stated that poor households can survive on R 753 per month.

Bathabile Dlamini NEC

Far from actually getting to the nexus and validity of the DA’s claim, the official communication from the Minister’s office is not even a thinly veiled political attack on the DA. An attack which is tenuous in principle as organs of state should not be used as vehicles in a game of political bumper cars.

It is one thing to clarify an accusation made against the department, it is, however, a far more serious thing to betray your obvious party loyalty and to use the institutional weight of your office to attack a political party.

While the Minister does not admit that the basic social grant is insufficient, her office does attempt to pass the buck (something she practiced recently at The Oyster Box) to the National Treasury.

And then, to try and further dismantle her culpability, her office points out that the DA has allegedly been inconsistent with their party position on social grants, relating Patricia Kopane’s comments about [social grants] creating dependency problems as somehow being official DA policy.

“We also hasten to add that every year the Department of Social Development has been on the record advocating for social grants increases that are above the inflation rate.”

We, South Africans, hasten to add, that this is still insufficient especially in light of Bathabile’s inflated sense of lifestyle.