#SONADebate: Mazzone urges Ramaphosa to send corrupt officials to jail

File picture: David Ritchie/African News Agency/ANA

File picture: David Ritchie/African News Agency/ANA

Published Feb 12, 2019

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PARLIAMENT - President Cyril Ramaphosa should rid public life of the corrupt officials who robbed the state of billions and send them to prison, Democratic Alliance public enterprises spokeswoman Natasha Mazzone said in the debate on his state of the nation address on Tuesday.

"Mr President send them to jail, don't bring them to Parliament," Mazzone hammered in her speech, in which she implied that government was still filled with people who are facing corruption allegations.

Mazzone said the evidence before the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture had left the country reeling to the point where taxpayers would not mind if their money was spent on a special prison wing to house them.

"In fact, the more people that are named in various inquiries, the more I look around Parliament seeing those very people seated alongside me. What an embarrassment. What an indictment on everything we stand for."

Turning to the Eskom crisis, she said the country was no longer experiencing load-shedding but rolling blackouts that risked killing the economy.

Four days after Ramaphosa announced that the power utility would be unbundled in a bid to haul it out of crisis and guarantee affordable electricity, Eskom implemented what it terms stage 4 load-shedding, cutting 4,000 megawatts of power rotationally, after six generation units went down on Monday.

"It is persistent rolling blackouts. It is killing our economy," Mazzone said.

African News Agency (ANA)

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