Author: Daniel Steyn

Poor audit outcomes show the lack of skills, stability and discipline in municipalities, the Auditor-General of South Africa Tsakani Maluleke told Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs on Tuesday. Maluleke was tabling the local government audit outcomes of the 2022/23 financial year. She announced that R3.4-billion of infrastructure grants had gone unspent and R7.4-billion had been lost to fruitless and wasteful expenditure – up from R4.9-billion in 2021/22. The audits also revealed R24.1-billion in unauthorised expenditure. Infrastructure projects were often beset by project delays, cost overruns or poor-quality construction work. Of the 257 local and district municipalities,…

Something must be done to solve South Africa’s social ills but the country cannot afford nor sustain a Basic Income Grant (BIG). This was the position of Business Unity South Africa’s CEO, Cas Coovadia, during GroundUp and Black Sash’s BIG Debate in Cape Town on Thursday. The proposed Basic Income Grant (BIG) would be a cash transfer from the government to citizens aged 18 to 59. The South African government has expressed support for this, and has indicated that the existing R370 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant that was introduced during Covid, could be the start of a more…

Bonginkosi Nxumalo, an unemployed teacher from Daveyton in Benoni, has been getting the R350 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant each month since it was introduced during the covid lockdown in 2020. But in January 2023, he received an SMS from the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) alerting him that his cellphone number had been changed. After getting this message, he did not receive monthly grant payments again. He has tried several times to report the fraud to SASSA via email. Each time he is told that his case has been escalated. It is now a year later and…