Lessons in looting

FROM low-level bureaucratic corruption to high-level administrative graft, the Eastern Cape Education Department is being torn apart by corrupt officials. Scopa chairman Max Mhlati has blasted the department’s abysmal financial management, saying a "major shake-up” is needed.

"We need new blood in that department because the senior managers have been there throughout the financial mayhem,” he said.

Mhlati said the department was an embarrassment and the levels of corruption were a slap in the face of democracy.

Looting sprees within the department are executed through ingenious but often simple scams.

Details of the graft and methods used to empty state coffers are contained in highly confidential Special Investigating Unit (SIU) reports and department charge sheets.

The chief executive of the Ikhala FET College has been charged with various counts of financial misconduct during her tenure at the institution. She was suspended from the college for the transgression but was reinstated in June.

Zituta could not be reached for comment.

The SIU investigation into Zituta also looked at Mtunase Kali, who served as chairman of the college’s finance committee.

Kali, who was the department’s internal audit director, is alleged by sources to be part of the "Education Mafia”.

Both officials were linked in an SIU report into the alleged misappropriation of more than R34-million from a Queenstown college.

Kali was also reinstated in June. panies are then used to supply the quotes.

Corrupt officials then control who receives the job and the work is never carried out.

Other officials, mostly those in charge of payments, transfer funds into their siblings’ or friends’ bank accounts.

Some officials do it the old way – by doctoring travel claims.

Numerous officials are suspended by the department every year for this type of corruption.

They include the department’s former internal auditor, who was fired in 2010 for fraudulent claims of R118 000. The person’s name does not appear in the SIU document and education spokesman Loyiso Pulumani declined to supply it.