The ANC chair of parliament’s water & sanitation portfolio committee has called for ministers of the department from 2012 to 2018 to be held accountable for corruption that took hold during this period.
The department has been notorious for its deep levels of corruption.
Robert Mashego’s extraordinary comments during a committee meeting on Tuesday were implicitly directed at former water & sanitation minister Nomvula Mokonyane, a member of the ANC’s national executive committee and national working committee who was minister of water & sanitation from 2014 to 2018. Mashego did not mention names.
Mokonyane came out badly in the latest report of the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture, which accused her of having accepted thousands of rand and gifts from corruption-accused company Bosasa.
From 2010 to 2014, the minister of water & environmental affairs was the late Edna Molewa.
Mashego’s comments followed a presentation by the department’s acting director-general, Frans Moatshe, on the extent of corruption in the department and action being taken against those responsible.
Moatshe said that unauthorised expenditure now stood at R641m — R349m for the war on leaks programme and R292m for the programme to eradicate the bucket system — while irregular expenditure on the main account stood at R9.8bn and fruitless and wasteful expenditure at R64m.
Including irregular expenditure of R8bn on the water trading account, the department’s total irregular expenditure is R17.9bn of which R10bn is in the process of condonation by the Treasury because investigations have been completed, R6.8bn is still under investigation and investigations into a further R1bn have been concluded.
Nine senior management officials and 100 officials of lower rank were found guilty after forensic investigations, Moatshe said.
“The financial health of the water & sanitation sector is challenged by a number of internal and external factors, including high incidents of improper expenditure, the existence of fraud and corruption, and poor financial performance and position,” Moatshe said. This was an impediment to effective service delivery.
Mashego referred to the war on leaks programme, which he said was announced, without it having a budget, by former president Jacob Zuma in his 2012 state of the nation address.
Savings were made elsewhere in the department’s budget to fund it. There was never a budget for the programme, which continued to incur irregular expenditure that was never regularised before it ended last year.
According to reports, the alleged wasteful expenditure of the programme totalled R3.3bn, which has been under investigation by the Special Investigating Unit.
“They deliberately did not budget for it because they wanted it to be paid irregularly for whatever reason. It is for that reason that it became so huge,” said Mashego.
He said ministers could not be blamed for corruption, but they enabled it to take place from 2012 to 2018. There was no way, he said, that the minister during this period was unable to detect irregular spending on the war on leaks programme.
“The minister or ministers should be held accountable having enabled corruption to take place in this department. In order to enable it to take place the ministers did not want to appoint permanent directors-general as a director-general would have stopped it.
“An acting director-general is at the behest of the beholder. That is the enablement of corruption that I am talking about. They did not want to appoint full-time chief financial officers as CFOs would have stopped this rot.”
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