The Auditor-General reports an irregular first and second tier government spend of R51bn. Add to this a similar non-compliant spend by SOE’s of 24bn; mind boggles when politicians speak of oversight and other challenges. That wonderful racial stereotype where the police are British, cooks are French, and lovers are Italian, leads one to wish that Mr Gordhan was German. Achtung!
Three months ago, it was reported that the Eastern Cape government owes 8400 service providers R2bn: this has caused builders on 37 Eastern Cape schools under construction, to walk off site. The education spokesman attributes this to “interdepartmental reporting” challenges.
The above leads one to consider a sentiment, expressed by the UCT Graduate School of Business keynote speaker this week: “We know what we need to do in South Africa. We’ve probably got the money but damn, we not good at consequences.” The gentleman (van Schalkwyk) is a corporate executive in the Auditor-General’s office: he estimates that 98% of irregular expenditure of public funds in South Africa is not followed up in any meaningful way. Furthermore, he estimates that such expenditure is increasing at the rate of 200% over the last year.
Capitec has bought Mercantile Bank. This gives that innovator direct access to the business market. This is going to be interesting.
An interesting note on our stock market value declines: from five-year highs, the biggest loser was not Steinhoff, but Aveng and Group Five: the latter two lost 99% of their value.
I’m not a follower of that newspaper, but I noticed an article in Die Vryburger to the effect that Germany will not invest in South Africa as long as BEE is not scrapped: Reference
I confess to being surprised; does anyone know whether this is fake news or not? I was not able to determine this.
As you were: looking at the free trade deal that the UK and EU are negotiating, it appears that the UK wants everything under a free trade agreement which it used to have!
