By Anim van Wyk for AFRICA CHECK –
The size of South Africa’s civil service has increased dramatically in recent years. But are there really more civil servants in SA than in the United States, as has been said? The claim is false.
The claim crops up frequently in tweets, blog posts and comment pieces.
Even Sunday Times columnist Stephen Mulholland weighed in on the subject last year in a column headlined, “An orgy of jobs for bureaucratic pals”. “We have more people on the state payroll than the US, which has a population six times the size of ours and a gross domestic product (GDP) some 45 times bigger than ours,” Mulholland claimed. A News24 contributor described the South African civil service as “the largest gravy train ever seen in Africa”.
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