TARA TURKINGTON, Johannesburg | Friday
THE interim CEO of the cash-strapped South African Heritage Resources Agency (Sahra) has been spending a large part of a fund set up to transform the organisation on fancy hotels and personal travel.
New CEO Pumla Madiba, who takes office in January, will have to sort out a difficult inheritance: a much slimmer transformation fund and a culture of secrecy on how the money is being spent.
Andrew Hall, her acting predecessor, has spent approximately R100000 in the seven months he has been at Sahra in Cape Town on a four-star hotel, meals, parking, flying to Kimberley – where he lives – and even on laundry.
He stayed at the plush Townhouse for four months, but recently downgraded to the Parliament, where his monthly bills are about R8000. In April Sahra replaced the National Monuments Council (NMC) and was given a R2,8m transformation fund by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology to redefine itself and address the country’s neglected heritage. The fund was in addition to the annual budget of about R6-million.
The transformation fund is supposed to be administered by the Sahra council, appointed by the Cabinet. At the first, rushed meeting of the new council in March, a budget for the R2,8m was approved, including R160000 for Hall’s personal expenses.
The Sahra council has never seen a cost report of how the budget is being spent. Hall is the only person who authorises expenditure from the account and cheques are signed by him and one other person.
More than R1m has already gone. A senior staffer said: “Hall authorises everything from the transformation budget, whatever the amount. I don’t know what happened to transparency.”
Asked why the council had not monitored expenditure closely, Sahra chair Wandile Kuse said: “You’re catching us on the wrong foot now, while we’re trying to find our feet.”
Hall, asked to comment, said: “I don’t like being holed up in a hotel. It may look like a large amount, but I do not know what else the council could do.”
Hall’s predecessor, George Hofmeyer, is understood to have been paid R500 000 from the transformation fund to go quietly.
Hall’s appointment was recommended by Musa Xulu, deputy director general of arts and culture who was suspended earlier this month in the wake of corruption allegations.