The Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, Dean Macpherson, told Parliament last week that efforts to clean up his department are facing “organised resistance”.

After setting out successes in various governance and administrative issues and referring to the infrastructural projects in which his department was involved, Minister Macpherson turned to the difficulties that continue to undermine it.

He said that an initiative to gather information on the Expanded Public Works Programme revealed political gatekeeping, jobs-for-pals, ghost workers, and demands for sexual favours.

“That is not public employment. That is exploitation,” he said.

More serious, high-level corruption was taking place in the department and its associated entities, particularly in the Property Management Trading Entity (PMTE). This oversees an enormous and valuable portfolio of public property. Efforts were underway to root out crooked officials and deal with the practices they were using to profit from them.

The PMTE should be a driver of economic growth, but has not achieved a clean audit since 2014. The state was paying some R6 billion annually on private leases, often on unfavourable terms. Attempts at oversight and correction were ignored. All of this was symptomatic of widespread corruption.

Macpherson added – echoing concerns that have been raised in relation to the Basic Education Department, also headed by= a member of the Democratic Alliance – that certain officials were “forced to attend political party study groups”.

“The department belongs to the people of South Africa; it does not belong to any party, landlord, contractor, official, private interest, or criminal syndicate,” he said.

However, these same officials had a lot to lose and were intent on protecting themselves.

“We have seen a similar fightback at the [Independent Development Trust],” he continued, “where efforts to act on serious corruption allegations were met with fake call logs, AI voice notes, fabricated claims, manipulated narratives and even allegations that a journalist had been offered R60 000 in cash to suppress negative reporting. That showed us what happens when corruption is threatened: it organises, attacks, misleads, and tries to intimidate.”

The Independent Development Trust is a state-owned entity that manages social infrastructure programmes for the government – it falls under the control of the Minister of Public Works.

Macpherson said a programme to root out ghost employees was nearing completion. He said that 60 such people – receiving salaries while not being employed – had been identified. KwaZulu-Natal was the most troubled region in this respect.

Macpherson’s spokesman, Lennox Mabaso, subsequently told the media that this group of ghost employees was costing the state close to R15 million annually.

Mabaso said that a key means of identifying delinquent officials was the use of lifestyle audits. A total of 69 senior officials had been selected to undergo lifestyle audits. The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) said that 53 of these had provided the complete documentation requested, six made partial submissions, one made no response, and one resigned during the period. (It is unclear what has become of the outstanding eight officials’ responses.)

Mabaso continued: “Minister Macpherson has made it clear that any refusal or failure to comply with a lawful lifestyle audit process is unacceptable. At the beginning of May, the minister wrote to the director-general directing him to take immediate control of the matter and issue a formal directive to all affected officials requiring [their] full compliance with all lawful and reasonable requests made by the SIU.”

Ghost workers are a long-standing phenomenon in South Africa. In part, it can be traced to the uneven process of amalgamation of the various bureaucracies during the transition to democracy. State employment is a relatively lucrative and protected livelihood, and it appears that some officials were able to obtain multiple incomes for themselves, or for family members. Criminal groups were able to take advantage of this.

Combatting the phenomenon is a priority of the Government of National Unity, with the use of technological verification tools being central to doing so. In the past, attempts to deal with it have sometimes resorted to such expedients as requiring staff to stand outside their offices holding their identification documents for inspectors to check.