Finance minister Enoch Godongwana has told MPs that South Africa’s corruption crisis should be blamed on greed and not on the policy of cadre deployment.
The minister was responding to questions in the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on Thursday afternoon.
His appearance comes amid a wave of corruption sweeping the country, including the Tembisa Hospital scandal and the peculiar termination of the political killings task team at the South African Police Service (SAPS), which has led to the establishment of the Madlanga Commission.
DA MP Hendrik van den Berg asked the minister how he sought to respond to the damage done by cadre deployment to municipalities around the country. Godongwana took exception to the characterisation of municipal governance ruin as a result of deployment, calling it pure “greed”.
“The system is such that [when] holding people accountable, there are institutions and legislation that are intended for people to be held accountable …[but] people find ways of ducking the system … There’s no cadre deployment about it. It’s just greed, and as a society, we should get better at condemning greed, not politicising it and saying it belongs to cadre deployment. There is no such thing.”
He said in the R2bn Tembisa Hospital corruption scandal, officials exploited loopholes in the tender system to manipulate the institution’s procurement processes so that they could give a larger number of small contracts to their associates rather than issuing large tenders, which would face the scrutiny of the highest public procurement standards.
This December we are going to give each municipality an indication of how much they are spending on infrastructure, whether they are moving fast or not. If you’re not, by the end of March, we are going to take those funds and put them to use at another municipality that is working fast.
— Finance minister Enoch Godongwana
“The Tembisa Hospital report … says you have a R500,000 limit below which you can issue three tenders. So they break down all tenders to be less than R500,000 to do what they want to do. They then give these tenders to their colleagues. That’s how that syndicate was working.”
Asked about municipalities that fail to invest adequately in infrastructure, the minister said National Treasury would conduct an assessment of local government spending on infrastructure, and those that failed to spend their allocations would forfeit them by March.
Asked by DA MP Nicolaas Pienaar how National Treasury plans to address underspending of infrastructure grants by municipalities, the minister said that while it was an uncomfortable truth, Treasury would be taking back funds from municipalities that underspend.
“This December we are going to give each municipality an indication of how much they are spending on infrastructure, whether they are moving fast or not. If you’re not, by the end of March, we are going to take those funds and put them to use at another municipality that is working fast.”
He said this approach had the unintended consequence of taking funding away from people who live in municipalities where the infrastructure is sorely needed. He urged municipalities to improve their spending efficiencies and use the infrastructure grant allocations to their fullest potential.
“The problem is that there are communities that are not being serviced by an inefficient and ineffective municipality. We need to find out how we put skills in place such that the people in those municipalities do not lose. That is the challenge that we are facing.”
Godongwana is expected to table his medium-term budget policy statement on November 12. It will chart the fiscal and spending outlook for the medium-term and is expected to provide updates on local government grant allocations and measures aimed at fighting corruption.
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