In Parliament today, I asked President Zuma whether he thought Andile Lungisa was a responsible civil servant. My question referred to Mr Lungisa’s previous threats of making South Africa ungovernable. In particular, Mr Lungisa, in his capacity as the chairperson of the National Youth Development Agency (NYDA), threatened to “close every street and if there is a cheese in your fridge they are going to take it.”(sic)
Unfortunately, President Zuma decided not to answer the question clearly and directly. Instead, the President chose to question whether Mr Lungisa had made the statement in his capacity as the NYDA chair, or as an ordinary ANC member. This is neither here nor there. The chairperson of a statutory body suggested that he would use state resources to make the country ungovernable– those are clear grounds for dismissal.
I do not believe that Mr Lungisa is fit to be administering a statutory body of this nature in the first place. Especially since that body has been given access to as much as R1.3 billion over three years. In fact, the Democratic Alliance (DA) believes that the NYDA should be scrapped entirely. These resources could be spent much more productively elsewhere. The DA would use this money to sponsor a youth wage subsidy, improve education to the youth or give opportunity vouchers to matriculants.
The millions spent on NYDA’s totalitarian youth festival serve as a clear indication of where Andile Lungisa and the NYDA’s priorities lie. We cannot afford to spend billions on such wasteful agencies, under such inept management, when millions of our people continue to live in poverty every day.
Perhaps the time has come for Mr Lungisa to hand in his own CV in search of a new job. The youth and government of South Africa would be best served by him in that way.