Whistle-blowers at major state institutions are being sidelined and humiliated for exposing corruption and mismanagement.
A man cried in parliament last week. Parliament’s cameras captured the moment, but the country’s attention is on the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry and the ad hoc committee, both of which are investigating the KwaZulu-Natal provincial police commissioner’s claims of political interference and corruption in the police and judiciary.
The man who cried was giving testimony at the full inquiry the parliamentary standing committee on public accounts has launched into the Road Accident Fund (RAF).
The witness, John Modise, was fired from the RAF in September 2024. He had been on suspension with full pay from May 2020.
That is four years plus some months to be paid to sit at home and do nothing because then acting CEO Collins Letsoalo was allowed to run that government institution like his personal fiefdom for so many years.
Modise said he even went as far as sending a private message to a member of parliament to report that the atmosphere at the RAF was so bad that employees had been admitted to a mental hospital due to depression.
Others won cases of unfair labour treatment at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, but were still not reinstated into their jobs.
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The media has carried stories of people like Zamaswazi Hlophe, who were dragged through legal processes so long and financially draining that they had to depend on good Samaritans to survive from day to day and to match the might of the government-funded RAF legal team Letsoalo had at his disposal.
Unlike Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, who broke ranks and turned to the media to get the country focused on what is going on in the police and its political leadership, employees like Modise could be hounded into submission without much recourse.
Not a thought was given to the waste of taxpayers’ money that went into paying a staff member who had been suspended for standing up to ensure the rules of the Public Finance Management Act were adhered to.
It is not very different from what has happened to fiery – and sometimes controversial – former spokesperson of the department of social development Lumka Oliphant.
On Friday, Oliphant was fired from the department for “serious irregularities” that allegedly happened while she was acting as a deputy director-general of corporate support services.
The director-general did not mention her role, so like Modise at the RAF, she is at the mercy of a broken system. She said she was “stripped of dignity at every meeting”.
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Modise at RAF and Oliphant at the department of social development are whistle-blowers who dared to stand up to their bosses.
But when their bosses resorted to long established government shenanigans to sideline them and drive them out of their organisations, they had no-one to turn to.
They are not as powerful as Mkhwanazi. In the case of Oliphant, she can take some solace in that she went out leaving the department shaken to the core.
The personal abuse of power by leaders in government institutions only continues because it is to the benefit of politicians who oversee those institutions.
Some politician benefited from the chaos at RAF and some politician is benefiting from the chaos at the department of social development.
This is where the government of national unity has worked wonders, providing an outlet for those who are abused by government technocrats.
