The SIU has come out in support for establishing a central register to flag officials who leave government employment as soon as they are charged with any form of wrongdoing to avoid accountability for possible misdeeds.
Briefing parliament’s justice portfolio committee on progress in implementing the Zondo commission’s recommendations, SIU head Andy Mothibi decried the prevalence of officials who resign in the face of investigations and before outcomes.
This, he said, made it difficult for the state to hold them accountable.
An SIU presentation to the committee showed that while the unit has referred a number of cases to the NPA for prosecution and to the special tribunal to freeze assets and recoup some of the looted monies, in many cases employees and directors of companies jumped ship.
“The issue around officials leaving in the face of investigation is problematic,” he said.
“The best we do — not to let them get off, because they would have terminated the employer-employee relationship — is pursue them based on the civil litigation process and of course based on whether there is criminal evidence pointing to them.”
The “phenomenon” was not limited to state-owned entities implicated in state capture, but cut across the public sector, including local government level, he said.
He said he didn’t have the specific numbers of implicated officials. Mothibi told MPs the unit would need to go back to its investigations to extract the names, including those cited in civil litigation and others referred for criminal investigation.
When we come across irregularities, we check around their profile to see their assets to see how much we can recover. If there are tangible assets, we freeze them pending litigation.
— Leonard Lekgetho, SIU chief national investigations officer
He was relieved to hear from DA MP Werner Horn that in the government’s response to the commission’s recommendations, President Cyril Ramaphosa promised to establish a centralised register of people who have been dismissed or resigned to avoid punishment.
“That would really assist, and we believe that a database should not only cover SOEs but departments and municipalities because we see this phenomenon across the public sector.”
According to SIU chief national investigations officer Leonard Lekgetho, if an official resigns during an investigation, the unit goes to court to freeze their pension, but “in most instances, they left even before we came in, and that’s why we could not freeze their pensions”.
“But when we come across irregularities, we check around their profile to see their assets to see how much we can recover. If there are tangible assets, we freeze them pending litigation.”
The commission recommended that SOE employees and officials alleged to have committed transgressions during state capture be investigated and where necessary be subjected to disciplinary processes within the SOEs.
In the government’s response, published last October, Ramaphosa acknowledged there was no legal recourse to address the matter of officials who resign to avoid disciplinary action.
“There is currently no centralised register of people who have been dismissed from organs of state or those that have resigned to avoid being disciplined.”
He said while the department of public service and administration tracks disciplinary action across national and provincial departments and the department of cooperative governance maintains a database of disciplinary actions at local government, there was no single register that covers all spheres of government and SOEs.
He then announced that these departments, along with the department of public enterprises and the National Treasury, had been directed to collaborate to design and implement appropriate solutions to address this challenge.
“The developed mechanisms will be rolled out across government in April 2023,” he said.
At the time of publishing, the Presidency had not responded on how far this process is.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.