The apparent lack of documents and paper trails are major issues creating roadblocks for the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) in carrying out its mandate to investigate multiple matters at Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA).
Today, the SIU revealed in a meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Account (SCOPA) that documents, contracts and payment details at PRASA are simply missing with no indication of their whereabouts. This is seriously hindering their ability to investigate the gross irregularities and corruption at the SOE.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) will submit parliamentary questions to the Minister of Transport, Fikile Mbalula, to hold him to account for failing to ensure that PRASA follows the most basic record keeping.
The challenges faced by the SIU are not only limited to the non-availability of documentation and that some documents cannot be located. The SIU also highlighted the lack of proper document control and contract management and most contracts cannot be located. And despite attempts being made to obtain the documents from service providers they are not having much success. It also seems that some service providers are either deregistered and/or liquidated. Procurement processes also appear to be routinely disregarded, overpayments are common and there appear to have been very deliberate attempts to hide the trail of irregularities and corruption.
The SIU is identifying the officials responsible for the keeping of records and documents for possible disciplinary action but cited this as a huge gap in the public record.
Given the utter train smash that is PRASA, and how it is failing in its mandate to provide transport to the people of South Africa, this utter lack of cooperation is deeply concerning. The SIU described this as being maladministration of the highest order, and appealed to SCOPA to assist where it can.
In fact, the situation can only be described as a deliberate attempt to mislead the public, frustrate investigations, and a shielding of officials working for Prasa.
The DA urges PRASA to cooperate with the SIU in order to ensure that the rot of corruption at the SOE is exposed.
Indeed, this is not a problem just confined to PRASA, but is a common problem across many governmental institutions.