Corruption-busters must ‘do their jobs’
established they had seen the lowering of the prices of land bought by government.
The government had complained it was charged huge prices by farmers to buy land for land reform programmes.
The ANC has been discussing land over the past few months, with President Jacob Zuma and others backing him calling for the expropriation of land without compensation.
Zuma even urged the ANC to co-operate with parties who backed his plans to amend the constitution and deal with the land question.
However, the ANC voted against the EFF in Parliament on a motion to amend the constitution.
Zuma said in Parliament three weeks ago when he was presenting the Presidency’s budget vote that there would be no Zimbabwe-style land grabs in South Africa.
He said the land question would be dealt in a fair process and in line with the laws of the land and the constitution.
Gobodo also told Parliament there was a backlog of land claims they needed to attend to.
These cases date backed to the first window of 1998 and they had to reduce the backlog before the new window re-opened.
They want to fix the backlog cases before the Restitution of Land Rights Bill is fixed by Parliament after being directed by the Constitutional Court. INSTITUTIONS such as the Hawks that were mandated to investigate corruption and other crimes should be compelled to do their jobs, ANC MP Amos Masondo said yesterday.
“We must compel people to do what they are supposed to do. If need be, we must go the court route,” Masondo said.
He heaped praise on the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) board for taking the Hawks to court over delays in investigating multi-million tenders irregularly awarded by the troubled state-owned entity.
Prasa recently lodged a case in the high court to have the elite unit ordered to investigate the matters referred by the board.
During a briefing of the co-operative governance and traditional affairs committee by the Office of the Auditor-General, parliamentarians heard there were inadequate consequences for poor performance and transgressions in municipalities.
In the 2015-16 financial year, R16.8 billion in irregular expenditure was incurred, up from the prior year’s R11.1bn.
Municipalities did not have sufficient mechanisms for reporting and investigating transgressions or possible fraud.
A total of 73 municipalities had not established disciplinary boards, 53 were without corruption hot-lines and 50 others had no policies for investigations.
The DA’s David Matsepe was particularly worried about 43 allegations of fraud and supply chain management corruption (28%) uncovered in 151 municipalities, and recommendations that the Auditor-General be probed further were never investigated.
This happened as 14 other allegations (9%) were not properly investigated and 26 investigations (17%) took longer than three months.
Matsepe said there was a need to look at factors that made municipalities not perform to expectations.
“My thinking is that the powers-that-be in the provinces or nationally are actually stifling efforts of auditors. They don’t give regard to recommendations given by auditors that there are instances to be investigated,” Matsepe said.
Masondo said it couldn’t be that every year the same complaints were made on the failure to probe allegations arising from audits in municipalities.
“There should be meaningful outcomes. Cases must end at some point in court so that wrongdoing is attended to and there are consequences,” he said.
He also called for the naming and shaming of corrupt municipalities if the problem was to be eradicated in the country.
“It will be useful to ensure as we talk (about corruption), if we actually say which are the most corrupt municipalities and entities in the country.
“If we do that, we force focus and concentrate our minds on those. I know it will be a difficult thing to do,” he said.