Johannesburg - The Nkandla scandal is set to destroy three former directors-general in the Public Works Department, who face possible criminal charges, and ruin the careers of at least 12 officials beneath them, while the politicians alleged to have been involved have been cleared, for now.
This is revealed in the final report of the Special Investigating Unit on the matter, tabled in Parliament on Friday.
The report shows how senior officials surrendered control over planning, costing, implementation and oversight over the security upgrade project to the architect originally appointed by President Jacob Zuma to do extensive renovations to his private home, allowing the scope of the project to balloon and costs to run out of control.
As the accounting officers in the DPW, the former DGs – Solomon Malebye, Sam Vukela and Siviwe Dongwana – each at various stages of the project the department’s acting DG, face financial misconduct charges under the Public Finance Management Act for failing to protect the public purse in line with this responsibility.
Jean Rindel, the project manager and Sam Mahadeo, whom Rindel replaced, along with members of the KwaZulu-Natal regional bid adjudication committee, face disciplinary steps for deviating from procedure in the appointment of contractors and consultants.
Yet a forensic investigation conducted by the SIU into the finances of the officials shows none of them benefited financially from their deeds, raising the question of why they would have risked their careers, and in the case of the DG’s, possible imprisonment.
The SIU report offers a few possible explanations.
One is that, in many cases, officials were ignorant of the legal obligations they carried, while in others, “they simply failed to fulfil them because of, among other things, the absence of moral courage to do the right thing or simply the failure to apply their minds to the matter”, it says.
It also suggests some “deliberately ignored the applicable measures and used procedures they knew were not applicable, confident that their decisions or actions would not only not be challenged but in fact would be supported and endorsed”.
This brings in the question of political interference, with at least two of the officials claiming they were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they failed to comply with requests to make certain appointments in a hurry.
Former public works minister Geoff Doidge and former deputy minister Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu were named by the two, but there were also references in documents and oral testimony to the involvement of President Jacob Zuma.
All three denied the claims to the SIU.
There was also a common theme in the testimony of officials, who claimed that because the project involved the president and his safety, they felt they were not in a position to ask questions.
Mahadeo, for example, told the SIU it had been “a very special situation with a special client and therefore we acted specially”.
“To just follow up on that, what then happens to the rules of the game if you’re dealing with a special project and a special client? The rules stayed intact, possibly. The rules do not change but the way they played the game changed.”
Rindel said: “When the ministers and everybody got involved… Again they came, they are my bosses, I listen to them, that is number one.”
But Zuma’s response to these claims was that if the officials had “laboured under the impression that the president was the origin of any undue pressure being brought to bear upon them in the discharge of their responsibilities, they were in a position to report such improper conduct to the constitutional institutions which have been established to deal with such conduct”.
Sunday Independent