R4 million a month for a head office with no toilet paper in the bathrooms

Former SA Post Office CEO Mark Barnes said when he started at the state-owned company, they had swanky offices but not basic necessities, like toilet paper.

Barnes shared the story about his tenure as Post Office chief executive in a discussion with Business Day’s Peter Bruce.

He said when he started at the Post Office, their head office was in Centurion. “They occupied three huge buildings at great cost,” he said.

They had to pay millions for these three office buildings despite having a large, empty head office building in Pretoria.

“I was sitting in this fabulous office where all the rooms were big, the boardroom was big, my office was big,” he said.

“Everything had lots of space, lots of new furniture, but no toilet paper. That was the first thing I came across.”

“I asked, ‘How come we have no toilet paper here?’ Later on, I used that exact scenario to explain the broken economics of our purchasing system.”

Barnes did not leave the issue there. He found that the Centurion office setup was bound by an illegal lease costing R4 million per month.

“The offices we were renting were the subject of an illegal lease. The Special Investigating Unit had been involved,” he said.

To resolve it, he summoned the landlords to a meeting and bluntly informed them that the Post Office was cutting off all future payments.

When the landlord threatened to repossess the items inside the building and take them to court, Barnes welcomed the challenge.

“What, this stuff? We can’t pay for it anyway. You can come fetch it tomorrow if you like, but we are never paying you again. I’ll see you in court,” he said.

“We never paid another bill there, and they never phoned us again. We moved straight back into our old, proper home head office.”