DA gives Makhura a week to release corruption reports after spending millions on investigations

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has called on Gauteng premier David Makhura to release the individual Special Investigating Unit reports into corruption to the public before the end of this week following the release of the State of Integrity and Anti-Corruption Report.

According to the DA’s Jack Bloom, the Gauteng provincial government has spent more than R64 million on 54 reports to investigate suspected corruption.

However, none of those reports has been made public, in spite of continued looting and the killing of whistle-blowers.

Bloom noted if the Gauteng government was determined to win the war against corruption and maladministration, they should at least start by releasing investigation reports on the individuals within the provincial government and departments.

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“He promised to release those reports by the end of this week so if he is serious about cleaning up corruption within the province, then he must release the individual reports and then take action,” he added.

Bloom said the individual reports covered all investigations since March 2014 and probably contained dynamite information on corruption, involving billions of rands.

He said there should be no cover up or fudging of accountability for corrupt or negligent acts which have wasted huge amounts of money that should have benefitted the people.

“It appears that many investigation reports were simply filed away years ago and not acted on. I hope the consolidated report will not hide key details in the individual reports that may implicate MECs or other senior ANC officials.”

While Makhura highlighted the measures and partnership efforts in place to curb corruption within provincial government, he said the investigative capability of government needed to be strengthened.

“When prevention has failed and things have happened that you couldn’t detect in time, you have to investigate. When you investigate, you want to determine what went wrong,” he said.

“Sometimes you use audits, tells you witness of the system, controlled environments, what can easily be breached, and then when you have investigated, you must act.”

He said 84 senior management service officials who have refused to be vetted, as well as those in supply chain management who refused to be promoted or failed to disclose their financial habits, should be fired for not complying.

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The report revealed there has been a low rate of compliance by other designated categories, with the departments of health, and education having compliance rates of 44.1% and 43.7% respectively for the 2020-21 disclosure period.

“Because these two [departments] have many institutions, they have the largest employees. And they have many institutes; you have schools, you have districts, you have hospitals.

“If I want to summarise where our system is vulnerable, the bigger the department and the larger the budget – and these two departments, have biggest budget together.

“They take at least a R100 billion of our budget.”

He also highlighted lots of corruption happened in schools, and lower-level institutions and compliance was mostly needed there, including lifestyle audits of employees at lower levels.

“That is also an area of great interest – as I say, the officials who have refused to be promoted, have remained in the same low positions below director. But they are the ones doing everything,” he added.

Meanwhile, anti-corruption advisory council chair Dr Terrence Nombhebhe said the report considered the work of independent anticorruption agencies, including Corruption Watch and the Ethics Institute.