Parliament, Wednesday, 31 May 2023 – The Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs convened a workshop today with the Department of Cooperative Governance on the Community Work Programme (CWP) to discuss the CWP concept in more detail. The workshop follows the 2021/22 financial year service delivery performance reports that revealed that the department obtained qualified audit and all the three qualification areas were related to the CWP.
Furthermore, the committee decided to hold the workshop to further interrogate the CWP’s broader impact on the community, and whether it empowers the beneficiaries to do useful work. The CWP is a government-wide initiate which aims to provide a safety net to poor, unemployed and under-employed people by providing them with regular and predictable work, enabling them to earn a monthly wage. The participants are currently earning R110.00 a day and R130 for supervisors, for 2 days a week and 8 days a month or 100 days a year for as long as they need it.
The department is the only auditee which obtained qualified auditing within the cooperative governance and traditional affairs portfolio, all other entities received clean audits. The CWP also saw the department being the highest contributor to irregular expenditure to the value of R500 million as well as fruitless and wasteful expenditure amounting to R4.4 million due to payments made to deceased CWP participants and those in the employ of the state.
These further relate in particular to contracts that did not follow proper supply chain management processes, including a contract concluded in 2018-19, which the Seriti Judgement declared irregular. There also remains an unresolved R3.3 billion in irregular expenditure emanating from prior years going back as far as 2013.
The committee learnt that most problems in the CWP arise from the actions of the non-profit organisations hired by the department as CWP Implementing Agents (IAs). It was also discovered that the IAs have insufficient experience with financial reporting obligations, including proper asset management systems. Their experience with procurement from a public sector perspective is also limited.
To mitigate against the recurring CWP implementation problems, the department had undertaken to revise the CWP implementation model on an ongoing basis. This included interfacing the CWP database with the Home Affairs and PERSAL databases to prevent payments to deceased people and those already in the employ of the state. The committee indicated that while it noted the department’s efforts to revise and remodel the CWP, there was doubt as to whether the remodelling exercise had made any significant difference to the end users.
Briefing the committee on the revised CWP Implementation Policy, the newly appointed Director-General of the Department, Mr Mbulelo Tshangana, said the revised policy seeks to address and provide among other things, clear guidelines on the roles and responsibilities of the various role-players in the CWP. Mr Tshangana further informed the committee that given the negative audit outcomes, the department took a decision not to renew the contract of the IAs which came at the end in March 2023, to avoid the perpetual irregular expenditures.
He told the committee the work that was undertaken by the IAs has now been taken over by the department. He said the department further contracted provincial, district and site staff directly to continue with the programme.
The committee expressed its happiness with the progress that the department is making in addressing the challenges that CWP is facing and which led to the qualified audit outcome. It also indicated that it will arrange a meeting with the law-enforcement agencies, as the department has also informed them that it has handed over some of the cases for forensic investigation, as part of consequence management.
ISSUED BY THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMUNICATION SERVICES ON BEHALF OF THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE PORTFOLIO COMMITTEE ON COOPERATIVE GOVERNANCE AND TRADITIONAL AFFAIRS, MR FIKILE XASA.
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