The North West provincial treasury is intervening in the performance of 14 of the province’s 22 municipalities, which have been identified as operating in conditions of severe financial crisis. The intervention will include budget management, contract management, municipal standard charts of accounts, and standards of generally recognised accounting practice.
The lack of accountability at all levels of legislatures, government, and oversight agencies is at the heart of persistent poor public services, financial mismanagement, and corruption in South Africa, writes governance specialist Prof William Gumede. It’s time, says Gumede, for the principle of ministerial responsibility to be enforced, where Cabinet ministers are held accountable for wrong decisions in their ministries, departments, and the SOEs reporting to them.
South Africa’s Mining Charter is arguably one of the most advanced policy frameworks in the global extractive sector. Despite this, writes Corruption Watch’s Mashudu Masutha, severe levels of corruption have led to many mine-affected communities languishing in poverty, deprived of development, with few prospects of upward mobility. The best antidote to this scourge is transparency.
The Mozambican government is embroiled in a corruption scandal involving Swiss and Russian banks, shipbuilding companies, and billions of dollars. A civil society group in the country has filed an urgent motion to prevent South Africa from extraditing the implicated former finance minister Manuel Chang, currently jailed there, to his homeland, fearing that he will be treated leniently. The group has described South Africa’s decision to send Chang to Mozambique as “a victory of impunity”.
The Gupta family is the subject of a sprawling commission that’s probing years of theft of state resources. An OCCRP investigation uncovers new details about how the family’s close allies systemically undervalued and sold off tens of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds
A new report released by Corruption Watch (CW) today, South Africa Needs Clean Hands, highlights the corruption issues that have plagued municipalities throughout South Africa for almost 10 years.
Corruption Watch is sitting as a civil society member on the recently-established Infrastructure Built Anti-Corruption Forum, an initiative led by the DPWI and the SIU. The forum’s mandate is to prevent and fight corruption in the implementation of the national infrastructure investment plan which aims, among others, to address a history of massive infrastructure underspending by government and state-owned enterprises.
Corruption Watch will release its next report South Africa needs clean hands on Wednesday 18 August 2021. Based on complaints the organisation has received from the public, this report homes in on the extent to which municipalities have been captured to serve private interests, how municipal managers have abused their power, and how procurement irregularities have diverted resources for essential services, resulting in communities deprived of basic human rights and services.
A Corruption Watch follow-up report on mining royalties, released on 12 August, emphasises that in order for mining royalties to truly benefit the communities on whose land mining takes place, the rightful beneficiaries must be clearly identified. These are almost always the families and villages who are directly impacted by mining, and not the government officials, traditional leaders, consultants, mine employees, and others who have eagerly taken their cut out of royalties they did not deserve.