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Motshekga on military veterans department: ‘I found a wrecked ship’

Motshekga on military veterans department: ‘I found a wrecked ship’
Suné Payne
By Suné Payne
25 Feb 2025
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Minister Angie Motshekga has described the Department of Military Veterans as a ‘wreck’ – where politicians protect senior officials from accountability.

Defence and Military Veterans Minister Angie Motshekga has described the Department of Military Veterans as a “wrecked ship” as leadership issues, financial troubles and accusations of political interference were revealed in Parliament. 

Motshekga and acting Director-General Nontobeko Mafu briefed Parliament’s public accounts watchdog, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa), on Tuesday, 25 February 2025, on audit outcomes and investigations into the department.

“For many years, it has been operating under a very poor structure, an incapacitated department… We have a situation where the entire senior management is absent… Then we have the … entire staff which sometimes is not fit for purpose,” said Motshekga. 

Political interference alleged


The committee heard that when it came to implementing consequence management, there was “pushback”.

Mafu told the committee: “I think it was 2018 … the department deliberately formed an internal committee which was going to deal with consequence management in so far as irregular expenditure is concerned. But unfortunately, there was a pushback from officials. There was a pushback to an extent that it was then difficult to implement that consequence management.”

Read more: Dysfunctional database, slow pension payout, no comms — plight of military veterans Part 1

Scopa chair Songezo Zibi questioned what exactly had been going on and if this was because of interference by forces that included politicians. 

Mafu said that in “management meetings, it is not unusual to get officials who are not members of that management structure sitting and in fact, deliberating. So it’s part of a pushback”. 

She said even MPs were “in fact, visiting officials within the department… You have officials who are members of political parties in terms of not just membership, but in terms of them serving in structures. It’s a situation that we are trying very hard to deal with.”

Motshekga said: “I’ll bring you images of members of this Parliament, even in this house, who convene meetings [at the department] at the moment. I have images.”

Motshegka said that when she arrived at the department, she found “complete instability”. “We can’t even deny the dysfunctionality.” 

Read more: Legal action loading — plight of military veterans Part 2

Deputy Minister Bantu Holomisa said, “On a serious note, we are dealing here with a legacy problem. I think people must judge us on this financial year 2025-2026. Then that’s where you can begin to evaluate our performance.”

He said the new leadership was on a mission to put systems in place to “go and solve some of the problems” within the department, including preventing political influence.

“The fact that we always honour the invitations when we are called by members of Parliament in different portfolio committees, it means that we mean business,” he said. 

Another step, suggested by Holomisa, would be the committee obtaining a resolution from Parliament to have the Public Service Commission (PSC) conduct a skills audit at the department. 

“Send the PSC in and then we fix the department,” he said. 

Progress


Since taking over the department, Motshekga said she and her colleagues had adopted an attitude of tackling the challenges head-on.

“We have put a number of mitigation measures to make sure that we can reverse and begin to address our challenges,” said Motshekga, who said that several vacant posts had been advertised. 

A critical challenge the minister highlighted was the collapse of the management structure, particularly the internal audit function. The department is in the process of appointing an internal audit committee instead of outsourcing the function to a private firm.

She said this had “started to yield positive results and created some sense of stability”.

During the briefing, Motshekga made several references to the Auditor-General’s report on the department. According to the 2023/2024 report, irregular expenditure was highlighted to the tune of R42.3-million. 

However, the AG said, “I was unable to determine the full extent of the understatement of irregular expenditure for the comparative amount, stated at R42.3-million… as it was impracticable to do so”. The audit also found that capital assets had not been properly recorded and could not be located during the asset verification process.

Scopa chair Zibi said the department would be called to return to the committee once its budget was allocated. DM

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