Well-known figures have been blamed for the waste of millions of rands by the National Co-ordinating Committee for the Return of Exiles, says a confidential report. Wiseman Khuzwayo reports
A CONFIDENTIAL report on the disbanded National Co- ordinating Committee for the Return of Exiles (NCCR) charges that the organisation was dogged by fraud and corruption involving millions of rands.
The report singles out four prominent NCCR executive members as bearing major responsibility for the fiasco, if largely by omission: chairman Frank Chikane, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches; Brother Jude Pieterse, of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference; vice-chairman Mohammed Dangor, now an ANC member of the PWV legislature; and finance committee chairman Victor Gillings, of the World Conference on Religion and Peace.
The scale of corruption, involving R55-million of donor funds, is virtually immeasurable, says the report: “The only way to ascertain how much money was stolen from the NCCR would have been, in effect, to retrace the entire activities of the organisation.” Auditors told the two- man independent commission of inquiry which drew up the report that the books were “unauditable”, and “serious structural problems in the NCCR” meant that trying to maintain order “was like chasing an avalanche”.
The commission of inquiry was set up in April last year, when the NCCR was dissolved amid allegations of wholesale fraud by some of its staff. Headed by Professor Edwin Cameron, of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the Wits University and advocate Kgomotso Moroka, who were assisted by advocate Johan Spangenberg and attorney Yasmin Sooka, it heard evidence from 35 witnesses. Its recently released report is in the possession of the WM&G.
The investigation was initiated by religious bodies which were constituents of the NCCR. Funds for the NCCR came from foreign governments, the World Council of Churches and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The commission resolved that the NCCR’s executive committee must take primary responsibilty for its failures of competence and resolution: “They (the executive) had reports presented to them, but lacked the time or determination to take remedial action.
“They were confronted with what in retrospect seems a near-pathological case of organisational disfunction, which presented to them urgent problems of personality and structure; and they lacked the will to intervene. They oversaw a system which patronised the incompetent and shielded the inefficient…”
A lack of skills, poor planning, personal greed and destructive animosities permeated the organisation from top to bottom, the report says. Volunteers instead of qualified staff were employed at both national and regional level, and they were often incompetent.
The UNHCR representative in South Africa wrote to NCCR national co-ordinator Moss Chikane on February 28 1992, pointing out serious omissions in the PWV office, the biggest in the country. He stated: “Despite our training courses (for NCCR staff) and the subsequent printing and introduction of a set of proper accounting forms, very little has been accomplished in the PWV office…
“Beneficiary cards have not been kept, which makes it difficult to know accurately how much each returnee has been paid. Payment vouchers have not been prepared since December (1991) for grant payments. Some returnees have been paid in cash instead of by cheque, in contradiction to regulations.
“There is no organised filing… in the finance office. Files of returnees are spread around in various offices on the floors.”
The report says temporary staff members, working in co- operation with at least two permanent members of staff, managed to filch at least
R300 000 from the NCCR and place it in their own accounts or those of their relatives. It adds that the “potential for the commission of further frauds did exist, on a scale very greatly exceeding the defalcations which were traced.
“How far that possibiltiy was exploited we are unable to say, and will almost never know.”
No authoritative master list of returnees was ever compiled by the organisation. This, witnesses said, enabled staff, including highly paid officials and office-bearers, to participate in frauds.
For those returnees who did not have United Nations or South African governmental documentation, the sole requirement was an authentic letter from a liberation movement. But letterheads were stolen from the ANC and Pan Africanist Congress offices.
Some people presented themselves as returnees when in fact they had left the country after 1990 for the main purpose of returning to claim grants. People also came off the streets to register as returnees. Duplication and variation of names was practised, and first names were swopped with surnames to secure additional grants. One person was found to have registered six times.
The report says there was a complete absence of coherent and efficient office systems and procedures. At one stage only half the expenditures of the petty cash float of R30 000 had been accounted for.
An administrative secretary testified that irregular issuing of cheques by inappropriate and unauthorised personnel was rife. According to the evidence of temporary staff employed from March 1992, it was a simple matter to add a name to the list of electronic cheques requisitioned every month from the bank.
Electronic cheques were not returned by the bank, except on special request. This meant there was no automatic receipt system for payments made and no means of checking on where funds were deposited, the report says.
Uncollected cheques accumulated in the NCCR’s safe, where they could be handled by all who had access to it.
One glaring example of mismanagement involved the Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC) loan scheme, designed to plough money into returnee development by making loans available for starting small enterprises. The report says the project was “grossly ill-conceived” and “susceptible to corruption and abuse”.
“The scheme was… undigested and irresponsibly managed,” the report continues. “Over R2-million in unrecoverable payments was expended on it.
“The contract with the SBDC — though no fault of that agency, which was employing proper prudence — imposed only obligations on the NCCR, and exacted very little from the SBDC.”