Sunday's Rapport newspaper reported: "He did it because he had to return to the warehouse with an empty vehicle," basic education department director general Bobby Soobrayan told Parliament on Tuesday.

In addition, a corrupt contractor, using an old letter from the provincial education department, went to schools to collect superfluous textbooks. These were then shredded. According to Soobrayan it was illegal to destroy state property.

"But the service provider continued shredding and burning the books."

The provincial department paid him according to the weight of books he collected.

Such contractors were a "generic problem", he said. Systems in Limpopo's education department had collapsed, and corruption and dubious contracts were merely one symptom of this, he said, according to Rapport.