Unfortunately, the Department of Employment and Labour over the years has been an expert at not only raiding slush funds but in practising fruitless and wasteful expenditure. Year in and year out we read how the Auditor General (AG) has to report on those hideous findings.
At the end of last year two of the major entities such as the Compensation Fund and the Unemployment Insurance Fund didn’t even bother to hand in a report to the Auditor General (AG).
We still don’t have proper explanations for this. The Department of Employment and Labour doesn’t stand alone and this ongoing debacle is repeated in many other Departments.
The GNU is now focusing on all of this and hopefully we will see some results. The Auditor General (AG) does have power but for some reason or other they haven’t exercised that power at all.
Maybe the fear of the exercising of the power has at least produced some results with the GNU and the influence of other political parties, the Director Generals of the various departments are starting to up their game.
What is now needed is for the various departments to start practicing consequence management. We need to see people facing disciplinary enquiries and even criminal investigations.
My understanding is that the message has at least gone out to the various director generals that they are expected to root out the evil and then to follow up and try to recoup some of the stolen money.
Unfortunately, there is still efforts to set up slush funds which can easily obfuscate missing heaps of money. The Minister of Employment and Labour recently announced that she is going to set up a slush fund of over fifteen billion rand to try and create jobs.
These jobs are supposedly going to be job opportunities and created by the state. It sounds incredibly suspicious and with the history of the previous five billion rand slush fund (which was thankfully stopped) one can well imagine what might go wrong, go wrong, go wrong.
Another interesting and very concerning slush fund is the new hundred billion rand BE Fund. MP Toby Chance recently alerted the public that the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, Parks Tau, recently unveiled a proposed hundred billion rand transformation fund during his departments revised annual performance plan presented to the Portfolio Committee.
MP Chance said that this runs a risk of being a slush fund. Indeed it does! The whole idea of this slush fund is that it is going to be administered by the National Empowerment fund (NEF) and that fund is going to sponsor in line with the BBBEE regulations. Once again our government hasn’t realised that race-based legislation is negative and social engineering has always led to hardship and tears. Our government seems to be wanting to fund enterprises without looking at their viability or potential.
Unfortunately this seems to be going ahead and I call upon the public to watch this carefully and to be alert as to where the money goes and how it is spent. We have seen in the past monies mysteriously vanishing into thin air with no explanation whatsoever.
Public Investment Corporation somehow seems to gloss over massive losses. Hopefully the Government of National Unity will start asking the hard questions and I do know that already many of the Ministers have clamped down on the slush fund.
* Michael Bagraim.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Do you have something on your mind; or want to comment on the big stories of the day? We would love to hear from you. Please send your letters to [email protected].
All letters to be considered for publication, must contain full names, addresses and contact details (not for publication)