Criminals granted licence to loot with irregular expenditure disclosure exemption

3 April 2023

ActionSA is extremely concerned that Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s decision to grant Eskom an exemption from declaring its irregular and fruitless expenditure will allow the utility to hide criminality and theft at the embattled power utility.

As such we have instructed our legal team to interrogate the legality of this exemption, as we believe that this is a clear abuse of power. For too long the coffers of state entities were used for self-enrichment by the ANC and their cronies.

Minister Godongwana’s assertions that the exemption was based on technical accounting grounds, when viewed within the context of the State of Disaster and Minister Ramokgopa’s views that crime and corruption is not a significant issue at Eskom, paints a clear picture of an ANC abusing state mechanisms to hide the true impact of corruption and crime on our energy crisis. With this newest move, the ANC-aligned criminal syndicates will be given full licence to continue looting at the utility.

ActionSA finds it extremely concerning that Godongwana would attempt to reduce transparency at Eskom, as it sets a dangerous precedent for utilising these types of mechanisms to hide financial mismanagement at state owned enterprises. There is very little reason to believe that these exemptions will have a significant impact on Eskom’s ability to attract funding, yet the risk of abuse is immense.

While ActionSA agrees that Eskom should be exempted from some of the overly burdensome regulatory demands of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) that, for example, forces them to tender for maintenance contracts rather than directly contracting with original equipment manufacturers at a lower price, we cannot normalise the circumvention of measures intended to improve transparency to ensure that loadshedding is diligently dealt with and relegated to a thing of the past.

ActionSA, a party which values the Rule of Law, will maintain oversight of the work at Eskom to ensure that the ANC does not use it again as a honey pot for corruption.

Issued by Herman Mashaba, ActionSA President, 3 April 2023