On Monday evening, I sat in front of my laptop reading two documents. The first was an 11-page media statement released by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) under the heading “Tembisa Hospital Capture: How Two Billion Meant For Healthcare Was Stolen”, and the second was a progress report on the same issue.
The 40-page document, presented to President Cyril Ramaphosa, outlines results of the investigation into allegations of maladministration, fraud and corruption related to the supply chain management process at Tembisa Hospital from 2019.
The investigation is based on a 2021 Gauteng department of health report authored by Babita Deokaran who, at the time of her brutal assassination in August 2021, was the chief director: financial accounting at the said provincial department.
Deokaran’s report indicated that – based on an analysis conducted on the purchase orders issued between April 1 2021 and July 31 2021 – at least 63% of all purchase orders issued during the period under review for values between R400,000 and R500,000 were linked to Tembisa Hospital and its service providers. This raised red flags as the level of expenditure was excessive for the size of the hospital, as compared to much larger provincial hospitals in Gauteng.
The SIU report discovered numerous syndicates that worked with government officials to siphon R2bn. The three biggest are the Maumela syndicate, which received more than R800m; Syndicate X, which received just over R596m; and the Mazibuko syndicate, which received nearly R300m.
In addition to these three, six other syndicates are identified, and received anything from R3.3m to R76.4m.
The report states that “these syndicates are linked to activities of money laundering, fronting, collusion, fraud, corruption and racketeering; and made use of conduit companies and accounts for the benefit of singular person(s) and/or family/ies”, and places the role of officials – from the CEO of Tembisa Hospital to employees of the health department – at the centre of the looting.
The report reads like a script of a horror film. Discourse around such large scale corruption often focuses on kingpins and masterminds – with those at the lowest end of the food chain being referred to as “small fish”, as though their role is insignificant.
In this context, government officials are deemed the “small fish”, while heads of syndicates such as Hangwani Maumela, the “big fish”. But what is clear from the SIU report is that the role of government officials is central to the operations of the syndicates that collapsed Tembisa Hospital.
It was the Tembisa Hospital CEO who authorised the appointment of non-compliant bidders; supply chain management officials at the hospital who requested the issuing of purchase orders for non-compliant bidders from the health department; and officials at the health department who issued compliance certificates for “blatantly non-compliant bidders”.
The SIU also found that the same people at the health department who were issuing the irregular compliance certificates were responsible for issuing the purchase orders to the noncompliant bidders, and states that this “offends against the principle of segregation of duties”.
The scale of the disregard for the law by the Gauteng department of health officials is immeasurable and was the glue that held all syndicates operating at Tembisa Hospital together. For this reason, while our attention may be on the syndicates that siphoned R2bn in a province where the healthcare system is in a perilous state, we should not minimise the huge role that government officials played in this grand corruption.
They were not merely pawns, they were enablers who made it possible. There is no “small fish” in this story. Everyone, from the low-ranking official who signed off on an irregular purchase order to Maumela and Mazibuko, is a big fish. They must be treated exactly the same and punished with the same level of seriousness.
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