South Africa Keeps Recycling Corrupt Officials Into Its Municipalities

South Africans are about to vote, and the question on every ballot should be simple: why are the same people still stealing from us?

A man or woman accused of fraud should not be handed the keys to a city's finances. A chief financial officer dismissed for misconduct should not return through the back door with a new title and a bigger salary. Yet across our municipalities, that is exactly what is happening. The pattern is so routine that it has become a career path for the corrupt, and the people who pay for it are the mothers queuing for water, the children walking to school on broken roads, and the families who were promised a swimming pool that never opened.

The Evidence Is Not Hidden. It Is Ignored.

Researchers at the Institute for Security Studies, using its Anti-Corruption Tracker Information System (ACTis), examined records covering three to five years across 20 municipalities: nine local, three district and eight metropolitan. They used an AI tool built to search hundreds of thousands of documents and flag corruption patterns before institutions are fully captured. What they found should shame every council chamber in the country.

The first finding is that improper appointments enabled graft in 14 of the 20 case studies. In Beaufort West, two former mayors who face unresolved corruption charges now sit as councillors in the Central Karoo District Municipality. Think about that. People accused of abusing public trust are still holding public office, still voting on public money, still shaping the decisions that affect the people who accuse them.

At Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality, a chief financial officer dismissed for financial misconduct was reappointed as acting CFO and then promoted to chief operations officer. In Johannesburg, a COO was appointed even though she was implicated in a Special Investigating Unit probe into irregular COVID-19 contracts and a building fire inquiry had recommended disciplinary action against her. She was eventually removed. Eventually. Only after the damage was done and the public had paid for it.

The second finding concerns the tender process, where the theft is most direct. ACTis found clear evidence of corrupt tender awards in five of the 20 municipalities, and signs of repeated, irregular awards to the same contractors in another 11. Investigators identified five recurring tactics. Specifications are tailored to favour a chosen bidder. Contracts are inflated and project scopes quietly expanded. Emergency provisions are abused to bypass competition. Companies are paid for work that is incomplete or does not exist. And contracts are awarded to fronted or connected firms.

These are not abstractions. At Polokwane, bid requirements for the Mankweng stadium were reportedly completed only after the tender had been advertised, which is like writing the exam answers after the students have sat it. In Buffalo City, the Mdantsane NU2 swimming pool upgrade grew from R22 million to R71 million, and it remains unfinished. KwaDukuza received R1.2 billion in disaster relief after severe floods, then awarded several irregular contracts in 2023. Flood victims needed roofs, clean water and rebuilt homes. Some of them got contractors who were paid for nothing.

Then there is the fraud in the financial system itself. ACTis identified systemic malpractice in 17 of the 20 municipalities. Billions of rands in irregular expenditure have been recorded. Misleading reports hide poor performance. Weak controls cause revenue to go uncollected, cash flows to collapse and infrastructure to rot unmaintained. Every rand lost to a dodgy contract is a rand that did not fix a sewage leak, repair a clinic or pay a nurse.

Accountability Is Being Blocked, Not Just Missed

The most chilling finding is the deliberate obstruction. ACTis found that nine municipalities were actively trying to prevent accountability, with early warning signs in five more. Buffalo City withheld a forensic investigation report from the SIU and from Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts for more than a year. Polokwane filed court applications to set aside a subpoena from the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation and to block the release of documents.

Let that sink in. These are not officials who simply failed to act. They are officials who used the courts and the bureaucracy to shield themselves from the people whose money they were spending.

The Auditor-General keeps raising the same warnings: uninvestigated irregular spending, disciplinary processes that never begin, audit action plans ignored. The SIU, the Public Protector, the Public Service Commission and the DPCI all produce findings. The Madlanga Commission has brought swift consequences to some senior officials in Ekurhuleni and Tshwane. But too often the pattern is the same. The implicated official stays where they are, moves sideways into another public institution, or receives a sanction so gentle it amounts to a holiday.

And the scale of the networks is what should keep us awake at night. ACTis found organised networks linking public officials to private beneficiaries in six of the eight metropolitan municipalities studied. In Tshwane, the clearest case, officials steered tenders to preferred bidders while multiple actors manipulated the tender design and evaluation. Political protection kept the machine running smoothly. This is not a few bad apples. This is an orchard.

This Is a Pattern, and We Have Seen It Before

South Africans know what state capture looks like. We watched the Zondo Commission lay bare how public institutions were hollowed out and handed to connected networks. The municipal story is the same story at a smaller scale, and it has the same ingredients: appointments made on loyalty rather than competence, procurement treated as a private revenue stream, and oversight bodies that find the truth and then watch it disappear into a filing cabinet.

Here is the cruellest part. The ISS analysis notes that metros attract far more media and civil society attention than local and district municipalities. That is not an accident. Corruption thrives in the quiet places, where the reporters do not go, where whistleblowers have no protection, and where national attention arrives only in an election season and then leaves. The rural municipality in the Karoo or the district council in the Eastern Cape is where the theft is simplest and the victims have the least power to fight back.

Still, this is not inevitable. The same research identified Midvaal, Swartland and Ehlanzeni as clean, resilient municipalities. Ehlanzeni in Mpumalanga and Swartland in the Western Cape are not made of different people than Tshwane or Buffalo City. They have different habits. They enforce the rules. They act on audit findings. They keep accountability running every day, not just when a ballot is about to be cast. If a municipality can do it, every municipality can do it. The only question is whether leaders want to.

What Must Happen Next

We do not need another commission to tell us what is broken. We need enforcement that makes the corrupt pay a price they cannot negotiate away.

First, no official named in an unresolved corruption probe, a disciplinary finding or an SIU report should be appointed to any municipal, district or metro post, acting or permanent, until the matter is closed. Put that rule in law. Make the Municipal Finance Management Act bite. A dismissed CFO should never be reappointed to a more senior role in the same system. Full stop.

Second, procurement must be digital, open and auditable in real time. Every tender specification, bid evaluation and contract variation should be published before award, not discovered afterwards by a journalist with a court order. Emergency and disaster provisions, the favourite back door for looters, should be subject to independent post-award review within 30 days. Free markets work best when competition is real, and competition is impossible when the rules are rewritten for the favoured bidder.

Third, whistleblowers must be protected by law and paid properly when their tip recovers money. An official who withholds a forensic report from Parliament for a year should face automatic suspension and a criminal referral. Obstruction is not a bureaucratic technicality. It is theft with a filing system.

Fourth, the national treasury and provincial governments should publish a public scorecard for every municipality, ranking them on audit outcomes, irregular spending, tender transparency and consequence management. Sunlight is the cheapest reform we have, and the most feared by thieves.

South Africans, and the rest of us across this continent, have to make a demand as well. When you stand in that queue on election day, ask every candidate three questions. Will you appoint anyone implicated in corruption? Will you publish every tender before it is awarded? Will you protect the people who expose theft in your municipality? If they hesitate, you have your answer.

The Final Word

We are told that corruption is simply the price of doing business in Africa. We are told to be patient, that reform takes time, that the system is complicated. We have heard it all before, and so have the people in Mdantsane still waiting for a swimming pool that cost three times its budget.

Enough. The Constitution promised us accountable government, not a revolving door for the corrupt. Democracy is not just the act of voting. It is the daily discipline of holding power to account, and that discipline has been missing in too many of our municipalities for too long.

So here is the demand. Vote with your eyes open. Reject any candidate who protects, promotes or rehires the implicated. Insist that your council publish its tenders and its audit responses. Show up at the public hearings and drag the records into the light. The thieves are counting on your exhaustion. Do not give it to them.

Based on reporting by ISS