Manuel hits out at Magashule over Brandfort house funds

FORMER finance minister Trevor Manuel ripped into ANC secretary-general and former Free State premier Ace Magashule on the restoration of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s house in Brandfort.

She was banished to Brandfort in the Free State from 1977 to 1986.

“This is the same [former] premier who protests the approvals for the Estina dairy [project] totalling some R220-million in two weeks,” Manuel said.

“This is the same former premier whose daughter is a beneficiary of a R130-million housing contract‚ but now informs us that this minuscule project to restore the house to which our mother was banished has taken 11 years and can’t get done.

“He says, well everybody knows the money hasn’t disappeared. Where is the money that was budgeted for?

“And even the numbers he talks about for the restoration of that very basic house‚ for the R3-million he talks about‚ what does he want to do? Does he want to gold-plate the window frames . . . put in a jacuzzi . . . air-condition the house?

“No‚ that must remain that place of pain.”

Manuel spoke last night at a memorial service for Madikizela-Mandela at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.

He said she had “kept the flag flying” at the coal face of the struggle against apartheid when others were on Robben Island.

“It was Winnie in her deep resolve to be and live and fight and lead. It is that selfdiscovery that made her as strong and as uncompromising as we knew her to be.”