Tough consequences for alleged Beit Bridge corruption is GOOD news

7 October 2020

For far too long, South Africans have watched money being lost through wasteful expenditure and corruption without any consequences for those implicated or any effort to get the lost money back.

I welcome the news that, finally, this is changing.

Patricia de Lille, the leader of GOOD, inherited a national government department widely implicated in many high profile cases of corruption.

Officials in the department have been implicated in the funding of Nkandla, exorbitant lease deals, the irregular appointment of senior managers and approving inflated costs of up to R35 million for State funerals.

In March, a section of the border fence between Zimbabwe and South Africa was requested to be urgently repaired. Within weeks, allegations of sub-standard work by the contractor prompted De Lille to request the Special Investigating Unit to undertake an independent investigation in to the project. She also requested that her department suspend payments to the contractor until the investigations were completed.

The SIU’s investigations showed that De Lille’s initial suspicions were correct. The SIU investigation that De Lille requested revealed inflated costs and sub-standard work. Disciplinary processes against more than a dozen officials and criminal charges against two officials were recommended. These recommendations are already being implemented by De Lille and her department.

Tomorrow the SIU will also be seeking to freeze the bank accounts of the contractor to ensure that any initial payments made can be recovered.

We welcome the implementation of the report recommendations and support the SIU in their efforts to recover monies lost through wasteful expenditure.

Issued by Brett Herron, Secretary General, GOOD party, 7 October 2020