The Road Accident Fund (RAF) is renting office chairs at R1,666 per chair, per month.

This is according to a report in the Sunday Times, which stated that the RAF has a contract to rent 300 chairs at just under R500,000 per month for its Menlyn office.

Motorists will not be pleased to hear this, as the RAF is almost exclusively funded by a petrol levy. For every litre of petrol you buy, R1.93 goes to the RAF.

Making matters worse is that the RAF is technically insolvent, and the report stated it made a loss of R34.7 billion last year.

This was despite it collecting R33.3 billion in revenue in the same year. It is also failing to pay road accident victims, added the report.

The Sunday Times stated the RAF’s board was dissolved by Transport Minister Blade Nzimande this week, due to massive leadership failures.

The RAF reportedly acknowledged that renting furniture was expensive and “not the best option”, but could not settle claims immediately, and therefore chose this route.

Eskom’s chairs

If a scandal over office chairs for government entities sounds familiar, it is because Eskom was accused of similar behaviour in 2017.

Eskom demanded that Treasury approve a R24-million contract to buy 9,217 office chairs last year, which made headlines.

The request for thousands of “operator and visitor chairs” came after a R72.7-million contract for office and soft chairs was signed in 2013.

Treasury was suspicious of the request and conducted inspections of Eskom’s offices in South Africa. It found that only 500 chairs were needed by Eskom – not over 9,000.

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