The Semenya commission recommends senior Northern Province officials should go. Marion Edmunds reports
THE initial report by the Semenya commission into financial irregularities in the Northern Province recommends a purge of senior officials – many of them close associates of Premier Ngoako Ramathlodi.
Senior African National Congress members in the province say the report – which Ramathlodi this week decided to keep under wraps – “is heavy on senior officials” who may be fired as a result of the irregularities it exposes.
It is understood that one senior official in the firing line is the province’s principal accounting officer, Director General John Malatji. He was unavailable for comment at the time of going to press.
Several MECs also come in for criticism although it is thought unlikely that Ramathlodi – mindful of his support base – will fire them.
The commission’s findings include dubious property deals, tender board irregularities and local landlords charging inflated rents to provincial government tenants.
The report also questions decisions taken by senior Public Works Department officials whose behaviour includes trying to allocate R95-million for a new government complex without budgeting for the expenditure. The expenditure was blocked by the legislature – a fact not immediately presented to the commission – but it also emerged that R40- million had already been paid to the prospective developer.
Ramathlodi will discuss the report with President Nelson Mandela this weekend. The final version of advocate Ismail Semenya’s findings is due to be submitted at the end of the month.
The choice that Ramathlodi faces is grim. He must either axe the guilty and so erode his own support base, or stick by them and stand to be identified with corruption and incompetence.
Either way, Ramathlodi would play into the hands of his opponents, who include ANC provincial chair George Mashamba; ANC dissident Bantu Holomisa, who campaigned among public servants in the province last week; and political parties such as the Azanian People’s Organisation and the Pan Africanist Congress.
While Ramathlodi and Mashamba profess to having good relations, political observers say the province’s ANC is divided between the two and tensions between factions are building.
Mandela has issued strict instructions that the ANC will not tolerate a repeat of the dissension which tore apart the organisation in the Free State last year.
Ramathlodi has been coy about the report which is understood to have been kept even from some of his MECs.
At a midweek briefing he justified his stand, saying: “There are two sorts of interim reports: those that are published and those that are not.”
He said that evidence may still be put before the commission which could alter its “tentative” findings. Semenya is currently abroad.
Ramathlodi’s representative said the premier had sought legal advice on the meaning of the word “interim” to establish whether or not he had to make it public.
Ramathlodi’s hesitation may be in part ascribed to his concerns about the province’s deep and entwined political and ethnic divisions.
He has been accused of unfairly favouring the Pedis by appointing a Pedi-speaking director general, and subsequently of favouring Vendas in appointing senior public servants.
Ramathlodi has said that such dynamics could lead to the possible “balkanisation of the province” unless they were tactfully managed.
The Semenya report will also have an impact on Ramathlodi’s credibility as a “clean” leader in a poverty-stricken province, where expectations of delivery are extremely high. More than 90% of the electorate voted for the ANC in 1994, hoping for food, schools, clinics, water and houses.
Ramathlodi has already come under pressure after he lost his chairmanship of the provincial ANC to Mashamba last year – despite intervention by ANC headquarters.
Mashamba believes Semenya’s findings so far should be published.