“The DA is just playing politics and huffing and puffing … it is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
So said Steve Motale, spin doctor for the Patriotic Alliance (PA), after the DA announced it would lodge fresh complaints against Gayton McKenzie with the Public Protector on Thursday.
It will be the third complaint the DA has brought against the PA leader and sport, arts and culture minister in eight months.
The party has not said what the new complaints are about.
“Public money is not for strengthening political positions,” the DA said in a notice to media on Tuesday.
“McKenzie is displaying Olympic-level performance at ducking parliamentary accountability, but the DA will not let taxpayer money be abused.”
DA spokesperson on sport, arts and culture Leah Potgieter will file the complaint at the Public Protector’s head office in Hillcrest Office Park, Pretoria, and brief reporters afterwards.
The move follows a dossier the DA handed to Public Protector Adv Kholeka Gcaleka on July 23, asking her to investigate whether McKenzie breached the Executive Ethics Code.
That complaint had two legs.
The first was the R109.9m Mzansi Golden Economy grant programme, which funds artists, festivals and cultural organisations.
The DA alleged three of the six people McKenzie appointed to the panel deciding how that money was split were active PA members at the time.
One of them was Motale, then the party’s national spokesperson.
Potgieter said the programme had not been set up “to create opportunities for the PA”.
The second leg was the R30.9m the department spent on its delegation to the 2026 Fifa World Cup in North America.
Departmental figures cited by the DA put R7.9m of that on travel, R6.7m on a legends exhibition match, more than R3m on match tickets and R10m on programme activities.
McKenzie has said his own travel came to just over R1m for the five weeks and that he turned down subsistence allowances worth R55,000.
He appeared before Parliament’s portfolio committee on sport, arts and culture on August 4 to account for the World Cup spending.
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He left shortly before substantive questioning began at 6pm and returned at about 8.30pm, once most members had put their questions.
Committee chairperson Joe McGluwa said the department had given a general presentation without any of the financial detail members had asked for, and called it a waste of the committee’s time.
Last week, the DA accused McKenzie of cadre deployment after it emerged at least 19 people linked to the PA had been appointed to boards and directorates of public entities in his portfolio.
They included the National Film and Video Foundation, the National Library of SA, the National Arts Council, Boxing SA and several theatres and museums.
McKenzie has defended the appointments, saying no law stops members of a political party from serving on boards under his department.
In January, the DA laid a separate complaint with Gcaleka after McKenzie pulled SA’s official submission to the 2026 Venice Biennale, a pro-Gaza work chosen by an independent selection panel.
The PA has rejected every one of the complaints, calling the July dossier a stunt with no evidence behind it and saying the DA was counting on Gcaleka not finishing her work before November’s local government elections.
Motale said in July that McKenzie had answered every question put to him in Parliament and had “never ducked a debate”.
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