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Minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities, Lulu Xingwana, is off on another overseas junket. This time, it is to lead a delegation of businesswomen to Chicago.

Meanwhile, her Department continues to freefall. It has a vacancy rate of 77%, its finances are in a mess and it can’t even produce an annual report on time. It has not made any meaningful impact on the lives of the poor and vulnerable members of our society that the Minister is supposed to represent.

The Minister is clearly not concerned with minimizing the cost of her latest jaunt. When questioned on her trip, she said it was unreasonable to expect that they stay in a “pondok” and fly “lala-class”.

This Minister is living in lala land.

She needs to understand that her job is not to travel the world with high-flying businesspeople. It is the much tougher task of putting in place practical measures to protect vulnerable women, children and people with disabilities.

The Department is known for funding lavish overseas trips. The 2010/11 annual report revealed that R16 million was spent on travel in the 2010/11 financial year. Of this, R6.8 million was spent on a delegation of 49 officials on a trip to New York. This may have pushed up the profits of Bloomingdales and other boutiques on Fifth Avenue, but it had no material benefit for the lives of women, children or people with disabilities.

I will today submit a series of parliamentary questions asking the Minister to justify this latest jaunt. I want to know:

• How much this trip will cost in total
• Which hotels the delegates will be staying in
• Who the delegates are and how they were chosen
• Precisely how the trip benefited vulnerable women, children and people with disabilities

It’s time for Minister Xingwana to get real. She needs to come back to earth and deal with the plight of the everyday people as she is mandated to do. That is her job, not jet setting around the world with affluent business people.