SHIRLEY DE VILLIERS: Looters in chief
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Wednesday was a big day for SA. For starters, auditor-general Kimi Makwetu released the results of his real-time audit of the government’s multibillion-rand Covid relief spending. It was an indictment of SA’s ability to manage money.
Makwetu has been warning for years about the paucity of financial controls in various branches of the government. Throw Covid in the mix, and you’ve got the makings of a perfect storm for fraud.
It was a relatively broad-ranging investigation, given the time constraints, and the AG’s findings are well laid out here ( by the Mail & Guardian’s Lester Kiewit. It’s also heartening that there’s already been some action, with labour minister Thulas Nxesi suspending four top Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) officials, including commissioner Teboho “What Payment Delays?” Maruping, pending further investigation.
For a round-up of the UIF findings alone, this article (, by Daily Maverick’s Greg Nicholson, is worth a read. In short, there were: “overpayments and underpayments worth hundreds of millions of rand and [payments to] minors, the deceased and prisoners”.
Of course, this may have all slipped by unnoticed, given the evident orgy of electricity use around the country — at least if Eskom is to be believed. In a short time the national ball-and-chain had bounced SA from stage 2 to stage 4 of load-shedding due to “exceptionally high demand” from the moribund economy.
Some of those thoughtlessly sapping power from the national grid were, of course, members of parliament’s standing committee on appropriation, ironically trying to get online for the briefing by Eskom’s high command. “A lot of members are struggling to connect because of load-shedding. It is affecting oversight,” committee chair Sfiso Buthelezi bemoaned the situation.
It’s all covered by Marianne Merten here ( TL;DR: Eskom’s debt has been supersized to R488bn (equivalent to the GDP of a small African country – Uganda, in fact), load-shedding will continue for 18 months and the groaning utility is grubbing for a 25% tariff increase.
Elsewhere in the hallowed house, oversight was continuing apace. Importantly, the National Assembly was apprising the country of the difference between a “donkey” and a “tonkey”.
See, back in July EFF MP Khanya Ceza called acting house chair Richard Dyantyi a “donkey”. When taken to task for his unparliamentary language, Ceza clarified that he’d actually said “tonkey” – “‘a high-praiseworthy one’, derived from Roman”, he explained.
Luckily for the nation at large, Dyantyi has not ...
Makwetu has been warning for years about the paucity of financial controls in various branches of the government. Throw Covid in the mix, and you’ve got the makings of a perfect storm for fraud.
It was a relatively broad-ranging investigation, given the time constraints, and the AG’s findings are well laid out here ( by the Mail & Guardian’s Lester Kiewit. It’s also heartening that there’s already been some action, with labour minister Thulas Nxesi suspending four top Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) officials, including commissioner Teboho “What Payment Delays?” Maruping, pending further investigation.
For a round-up of the UIF findings alone, this article (, by Daily Maverick’s Greg Nicholson, is worth a read. In short, there were: “overpayments and underpayments worth hundreds of millions of rand and [payments to] minors, the deceased and prisoners”.
Of course, this may have all slipped by unnoticed, given the evident orgy of electricity use around the country — at least if Eskom is to be believed. In a short time the national ball-and-chain had bounced SA from stage 2 to stage 4 of load-shedding due to “exceptionally high demand” from the moribund economy.
Some of those thoughtlessly sapping power from the national grid were, of course, members of parliament’s standing committee on appropriation, ironically trying to get online for the briefing by Eskom’s high command. “A lot of members are struggling to connect because of load-shedding. It is affecting oversight,” committee chair Sfiso Buthelezi bemoaned the situation.
It’s all covered by Marianne Merten here ( TL;DR: Eskom’s debt has been supersized to R488bn (equivalent to the GDP of a small African country – Uganda, in fact), load-shedding will continue for 18 months and the groaning utility is grubbing for a 25% tariff increase.
Elsewhere in the hallowed house, oversight was continuing apace. Importantly, the National Assembly was apprising the country of the difference between a “donkey” and a “tonkey”.
See, back in July EFF MP Khanya Ceza called acting house chair Richard Dyantyi a “donkey”. When taken to task for his unparliamentary language, Ceza clarified that he’d actually said “tonkey” – “‘a high-praiseworthy one’, derived from Roman”, he explained.
Luckily for the nation at large, Dyantyi has not ...