Mayhem and waste at department of military veterans

The department of military veterans spent more than R24m in an ad hoc deal with a travel agency after their contract ended in 2015.

A forensic investigation into the department's CFO Sibongiseni Ndlovu in 2021 revealed that five years after the original three-year contract expired in 2015, the department was still using the Travel With Flair Agency to book hotels and flights, and to service the department’s travel needs.

The department’s failure to put a new contract out to tender resulted in millions of rands being declared irregular and wasteful expenditure by the auditor-general of South Africa.

The agency — of which former Miss South Africa Basetsana Kumalo is one of four directors — had also been tasked with securing quotes for accommodation and meals, a function the department had the capacity to do through its “movement unit”.

This was just one of the issues highlighted in the 2021 forensic report, which recommended that the department consider instituting disciplinary proceedings against Ndlovu on charges of financial misconduct and insubordination.

Though Ndlovu was suspended in 2021, he was reinstated in 2022 with none of the report’s consequence management recommendations implemented.

Approached for comment, Travel with Flair director Robert Wilke referred questions to the department of military veterans, saying: “They are not our clients since 2020.”

The report also detailed an inspection of assets in the department, which found that 742 assets amounting to R6.7m were missing and reported as being under investigation in the financial statements at March 31 2019. That number has since increased to R7.6m.

In 2020, the department was poised to appoint a service provider to assist with the reconciliation and migration of the assets onto a register. However, this did not happen.

The report also detailed how the department was embroiled in a scandal in 2022 after procuring 90 pothole-repair machines and 10,000 computer tablets to empower veterans. These were not delivered to the intended beneficiaries.

About 6,250 tablets were stored at a private telecom company at the department’s request as it did not have at its own facilities. The department is said to have not made arrangements to collect them, and they were subsequently returned to the provider, with 27 of them unable to be located.

Only 3,750 of those devices were delivered to the department. The remainder have not yet been collected.

Though Ndlovu's signature appears on all documents relating to these deals, he told the Sunday Times this week that he had nothing to do with them. He blamed the department's toxic work culture as the reason for the dysfunction.

“Before joining government, I was in the private sector. When I arrived, it was a culture shock. I came from a structured working environment where everything is cast in stone and we are all chasing the same goal in terms of targets, volumes and sales,” he said.

“Here people come with their own ambitions and agendas, which sometimes are political. It makes the work environment rather hostile and toxic. The portfolio committee referred to this department as a wrecked ship. It is very dysfunctional. I experience it on a daily basis. There are people who come here to work and there are people who come here to disrupt. There are those groupings.”

Here people come with their own ambitions and agendas, which sometimes are political. It makes the work environment rather hostile and toxic. The portfolio committee referred to this department as a wrecked ship. It is very dysfunctional. I experience it on a daily basis. There are people who come here to work and there are people who come here to disrupt. There are those groupings.

Ndlovu claims the forensic report was part of a ploy to oust him for refusing to authorise irregular requests that would have compromised his integrity.

“The biggest challenge here is the interim structure. The department itself was formed on an urgent basis and established to oversee the plight of veterans. They started with a structure that did not align with its mandate,” he said.

“We had identified potential maladministration, which may then be interpreted as corruption. We approached the accounting officer at that time, presented the matter, [and] it was reported to the military police and they came to assist. Somewhere along the line you could see that they were backtracking. They said to us that they were told to back off.

“The audit opinion, however, is not based on the structure. It is based on the people who are supposed to be performing their duties. Whether they have got the resources to perform, it doesn’t matter, the AG will come and audit as though everything is functional. We’ve got an approved organogram of 169. There are more than 40 vacancies; how is one supposed to function?

“It’s unfortunate that the systems of government are built around the constitution, which is very democratic — which allows chaos and encourages the behaviour that we have. Without stable leadership, consequence management is hard to implement.”

The forensic report said procurement committees in the department had never functioned properly due to a lack of manpower. This crippled their ability to exercise their regulatory responsibilities. There was fear among those appointed to the committee of challenges against their determinations, it said.

“It has been common cause that procurement was not involved in projects for providing benefits to the military veterans, or procurement prescripts not complied with,” read the scathing findings.

Last month, the Sunday Times reported how then deputy director-general of empowerment & stakeholder management Nontobeko Mafua was suspended just months after a forensic investigation found her to be incompetent and insubordinate, and recommended she be charged with financial misconduct for several disastrous projects that wasted millions in public money. However, her suspension was lifted and she was promoted to head up the department of military veterans. Currently, Mafu is acting director-general at the department.

On Wednesday, the parliamentary defence & military veterans committee said it would ask President Cyril Ramaphosa and defence minister Angie Motshekga to place the department under administration for incompetence and lack of leadership.

This comes after MPs highlighted the protracted extension of Mafu's contract as acting director-general, several key vacancies and the department’s broken organogram.