SOUTH AFRICANS were left in no doubt about the levels of dishonesty within the country’s public service on Wednesday, after it was revealed that corruption and negligence in the sector cost the taxpayer up to €3 billion each year.
Addressing MPs in parliament about his annual report, the government’s special investigating unit (SIU) boss, Willie Hofmeyr, estimated that each year around 20 per cent – or between €2.5 billion and €3 billion – of the state’s procurement budget was either stolen or deemed untraceable due to negligence.
Aside from blatant corruption, the failure of civil servants to properly monitor public spending had contributed to the loss, as had overpaying for products and services.
The release of the report has heaped pressure onto an African National Congress (ANC) government that stands accused of failing to deal with corruption and incompetence, especially when it comes to senior party members and government ministers accused of abusing state coffers.
Since January, public protector Thuli Madonsela has released two reports in which she found that public works minister Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde and police commissioner Gen Bheki Cele acted unlawfully in the process they followed to lease buildings from a private businessman for police headquarters at a cost of €184 million.
Ms Madonsela, opposition parties and civil society organisations have repeatedly called on President Jacob Zuma to act on her findings, but the ANC leader has yet to do so.
A second minister, cooperative governance and traditional affairs minister Sicelo Shiceka, has been suspended recently for breaching a ministerial code of ethics. Allegations against him include that he spent public money to pay for a flight to visit his girlfriend in a Swiss jail.
Ms Madonsela is also investigating ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema over alleged tender fraud, primarily linked to activity in his home province of Limpopo.
At parliament in Cape Town Mr Hofmeyr suggested South Africa would have to increase the number of dedicated anti-corruption investigators tenfold – to 7,000 – if the problem was to be tackled with any degree of success.
“[Our] laws, regulations and policies are pretty good. But if there are no consequences to them being broken, if there are not enough people to investigate an allegation that rules have been broken, and to hold somebody to account, then the culture of impunity spreads quickly,” he warned.
The SIU boss said his unit was investigating 588 government procurement contracts valued at €840 million. In the 43 cases the SIU had investigated from April to June this year, “irregularities” of €129 million had been uncovered.