Statement by Eleanore Bouw Spies MP – Spokesperson onDA Spokesperson on Public Service and Administration:
The Democratic Alliance (DA) believes that Minister of Public Service and Administration, Mzamo Buthelezi, must account to Parliament for ongoing lifestyle audits of thousands of public officials, without a single referral for any prosecution to date.
The DA has referred this matter to the Chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration, Jan de Villiers, to call on the Minister to appear before Committee and explain how nearly 9 000 senior public servants have undergone lifestyle audits, with 117 officials under internal investigation and 24 cases flagged by the Presidency for suspected undeclared income or hidden assets, yet no criminal action is yet underway.
The DA is in full support of lifestyle audits as a tool necessary for corruption detection, but the Minister’s admission that not a single case has been referred to the Hawks, the Special Investigating Unit, or any law enforcement agency confirms a serious failure in the Department’s anti-corruption response.
Lifestyle audits are the surest way to identify the smoke that leads to the fire of corruption. Often, corruption never comes out because both the corruptor and corruptee benefit and remain silent, while the public is being stolen from.
Taxpayers cannot be expected to fund corruption-detection processes that expose wrongdoing but deliver no accountability.
Without prosecutions, asset recovery, or dismissals, lifestyle audits amount to nothing but an expensive paper exercise.
Corruption at senior levels directly harms South Africans by draining money meant for basic services like water, electricity, healthcare and housing, weakening the state’s ability to prevent and fight crime as well as undermining investor confidence, costing South Africa jobs and economic growth.
The fact that no criminal referrals have followed raises urgent questions about political will, escalation thresholds, and misdirected accountability processes.
If corrupt officials face no real consequences, lifestyle audits will remain a box-ticking exercise, and at worst, expensive electioneering, rather than a genuine deterrent.
The DA will continue to hold Minister Buthelezi accountable for any failure to act decisively against corruption at senior levels of the state.
We will push for real consequences for government officials who abuse their public office and take advantage of public resources to fund their lives.
South Africans deserve a government that enforces the law equally and ensure that corruption is punished.
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