By Michael Hamlyn

Thoko Didiza, the minister of public works, has announced that her department is 14 billion rand behind in maintaining the buildings it has charge of.

Replying to a written question in Parliament, Didiza said on Thursday that 34,000 national buildings are in "poor or very poor" condition. The government owns a total of 100,603 buildings and according to the minister's reply, only 5.4% of them can be classified as being in very good condition.

The police are the worst off with more than 6,000 buildings in poor or very poor condition - a backlog that will cost 3.7 billion rand to put right.

The defence department's backlog amounts to another 3 billion rand while correctional services needs 1 billion rand spent on maintaining its buildings.

In addition to all this the various departments need 2.7 billion rand to be spent on new buildings in the present financial year.

Didiza points out: "This excludes new projects due to changes in needs expressed by client departments." It also only includes those building directly owned by her department and not those held by other entitities reporting to her.