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The South African Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) has uncovered “multimillion-rand tender corruption” at the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and has handed over all information to the Special Investigating Unit. OUTA said its revelations follow an investigation into corruption and irregular contracts at the Services Sector Education and Training Authority after a successful Promotion of Access to Information application relating to a ZAR170 million (US$9.6 million) tender for a biometric attendance monitoring system.

Four Eastern Cape Department of Education officials and a businessman are facing charges of corruption, fraud, theft, and contravention of the Public Finance Management Act for R59 million meant for schoolbooks. Under the pretence that schools were adequately resourced with textbooks, they decided without permission from the National Treasury to shift and use 80% of the budget for the procurement of supplementary resource material, mainly IT equipment and photocopiers.

As a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, a project to use ZAR866 million (US$60 million) to build a state-of-the-art technical and vocational education and training college in one of South Africa’s poorest townships could not proceed. The project was stopped by the Minister of Higher Education, but the money has not been returned to the National Treasury or accounted for in accordance with the Public Finance Management Act regulations.

Four former senior officials from the Eastern Cape Department of Education and a company director have been arrested on corruption charges involving the purchase of textbooks for students. The senior education official bypassed the department's supply chain process by obtaining a Supplementary Resource Material (SRM) agreement that was not required. Reports allege that the official received a bribe in the form of two laptops and a mobile phone from the company that received the R59 million for the SRM material.

A number of senior officials in the Eastern Cape have been accused of corruption in relation to an R1 billion-school nutrition programme in the province; another case involves irregularities in relation to school infrastructure provisioning or allegations of corruption in the awarding of a contract to EduSolutions by the Limpopo Department of Education. The contract for the procurement of textbooks for schools in the province was canceled in 2012 after millions had been paid to EduSolutions.

Two teachers have been arrested after practicing at Seme Secondary school for eight and two years’ respectively. They got their jobs by using fake qualifications. It is said that the Mpumalanga Department of Education suffered a combined loss of more than R2.4m. The department apparently became suspicious about their qualifications in 2017 and asked them to resubmit their qualifications. The two will return to the Volkrust Regional Court on February 6.

Two people are in hot water after allegedly defrauding the Mpumalanga Department of Education of an estimated R6-million. The two appeared in the Nelspruit Regional Court on Thursday over their alleged involvement in a bogus school-feeding scheme. The Hawks said that in 2011 the accused allegedly submitted several fraudulent invoices to the Department of Education for services never rendered. An employee of the Department of Health allegedly recruited owners of various companies to submit these invoices. The money was allegedly deposited into the said businesses accounts, as well as individual accounts and was subsequently withdrawn and shared amongst the syndicate.

Universities and business schools are grappling with the ethics curricula they teach to professionals and future professionals. This follows damning revelations of state capture involving accountants, auditors and consultants at major international companies. The dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand, said every crisis offers an opportunity. “There is a lot of debate within the senior executive team… we are working with two [international] economists, to develop context in the economics curriculum, it brings to the fore issues of power… so students think about economic systems with a historical perspective”.

The Department of Higher Education and Training will probe claims about predatory publishing, and could withdraw subsidies paid out for the academic articles in question. An analysis by Stellenbosch University researchers found that from 2005 to 2014, South African academics published more than 4,200 papers in 47 journals that were either "probably or possibly predatory". Predatory publishing involves unscrupulous open access publishers who publish articles with little or no real peer review. The government pays a university about R100,000 for an academic article, which has to be published in a journal accredited by the Department of Higher Education and Training.