Parliament has asked why the Ingonyama Trust built a R705 000 house for a traditional leader.
|||Cape Town - Parliament has asked why the Ingonyama Trust - a government body that administers roughly a third of the land in KwaZulu-Natal - built a R705 000 house for a traditional leader, saying clearer guidelines were needed to prevent a precedent being set.
The house was built for Inkosi Zenzo Khulumangifile Zungu after the Ingonyama Trust Board received a request from the Zungu traditional council in 2010 for a new residence for its leader.
The matter was highlighted when the eight-person board of the trust, which administers about 2.8 million hectares of land on behalf of roughly 4.5 million people, presented its quarterly report to Parliament’s oversight committee on rural development on Tuesday.
MPs asked if, in building the house, the trust had not created a precedent that would compel it to build houses for all the leaders of the 241 traditional councils on trust-administered land.
They also asked if new houses would have to be built for their heirs. Under traditional Zulu law, a traditional leader’s heir does not live in the same house as his predecessor.
Jerome Ngwenya, acting chairman of the board, said the trust was not planning to build more homesteads as this would be unsustainable.
“It is not necessarily a precedent we believe will be carried forward,” he added.
Ngwenya said Zungu traditional council land earned large mining royalties, which had influenced the board’s decision to build the house.
A number of MPs noted that the funds were supposed to be administered for the benefit of all inhabitants.
The trust collects revenue on behalf of traditional councils and authorities, which it later pays out for vehicles, bursaries and, at times, houses.
Ngwenya said the trust had also helped build a house for Inkosi Mabhudu Israel Tembe for R500 000.
Two more requests for houses were under review.
The board also told MPs that its staff of 39 was unable to handle all trust duties. At least three times as many staff members were needed.
Last year the trust received about R19 million in government funding, R8m from mining royalties, notably from the Zululand Anthracite Colliery, and R13.7m from other sources.
Political Bureau