MEC Gadija Brown revealed that although they are planning to reshuffle the top management of most departments, 70% of the Heads of Departments at the Free State Provincial Government are still acting. She further stated the Chief Financial Officers (CFO’S) of all the provincial departments have been shifted around. As the departments’ supply chain management is still manual and can be easily manipulated, they have taken a decision to reshuffle the staff around.

What bothers Brown is that less than 50% of the 63 000 provincial government employees are working towards moving the province forward. ‘’I would believe the people to be blamed are the managers, because they're not leading towards making the province better but to be bosses; if a bulb breaks in a director’s office, he or she will not fix it but call someone to fix it. They then say they are a director, fixing bulbs is not in their job description,’’ explained Brown. She, however, stated that the province has pockets of excellence, but it is sometimes overseen.

Brown explained that irregular expenditure do not always mean there was corruption. She explained it could be that there was a flaw in the contract management. “The framework of this irregular, wasteful expenditure is very critical. You do investigations to see if there was corruptions or flaws and monetary losses,” she further concluded. 

For the first time since 2019 they got audit companies to do some of the investigations for them. 

OFM News/Corn Koteli