The office of the Public Protector is investigating former NAC CEO Rosemary Mangope's golden handshake. Photo: Supplied.
The office of the Public Protector is investigating the National Arts Council (NAC) after a complaint was laid against the entity’s handling of its former CEO Rosemary Mangope’s disciplinary hearing and her subsequent golden handshake earlier this year.
The complaint was laid by Accountability Now director, Advocate Paul Hoffman.
He said the Public Protector has kept in touch with him regarding his case.
“My complaint was that they had let her go through an agreement that was too expensive. Certainly any organisation that is prepared to waste public money on such a deal, is not the sort of organisation that is run in accordance with the principles of sections 1 and 119 of the constitution.
“Sometimes you do have to settle a disciplinary process when things are going pear-shaped for you, but that deal was too much to stomach,” Hoffman said on Tuesday.
Mangope and the NAC parted ways before her disciplinary hearing could be concluded earlier this year.
She was charged in 2021, along with former CFO Clifton Changfoot, in connection with the disbursement of R300 million from the Presidential Employment Stimulus Programme (PESP) meant for struggling artists during the pandemic.
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While Changfoot’s disciplinary hearing was concluded and he was dismissed, Mangope was paid R924 000, which the entity said was an equivalent of six months remuneration.
In May, MPs blasted NAC executives for the manner in which Mangope’s hearing was handled, accusing the entity of withholding information.
The executives had appeared before Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Sports, Arts and Culture to report on its finances and budget, implementation of investigative reports and disciplinary hearings against executives accused of corruption and misconduct.
Public Protector spokesperson Oupa Segalwe confirmed the investigation on Tuesday.
“I can confirm that we do have that complaint and the matter has been allocated for investigation,” he said in an e-mailed reply.
When contacted for comment on the Public Protector probe, Mangope didn’t answer the phone but sent an SMS requesting communication through text.
Questions immediately sent were never replied to.
The NAC is an entity of the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture.
The Auditor-General South Africa (AGSA) is this week briefing Parliament on audit outcomes of government departments for the 2021/2022 financial year.
Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Sports, Arts and Culture on Tuesday heard presentations on the department’s 28 entities, of which the NAC is one them.
The AGSA’s Mbali Tsotetsi said the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture incurred total irregular expenditure of R105 million.
“The top contributors starts with the department itself which incurred R59.7m, followed by the NAC with R20m. The third one is the National Heritage Council with R4.5m, R3.6m at the PanSalb and R2.8m at Freedom Park.”
She said NAC exceeded its budget during the PESP programme, which was not compliant with the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA).
“At NAC, we see non-compliance with supply chain management, so it just shows that the action plan was again not properly implemented.
The department, said Tsotetsi, was “very slow” in overseeing consequence management at its entities.
“We have highlighted our concerns through the Status of Record Review earlier this year, where we highlighted that progress was slow in terms of the department investigations of allegations against officials.
“We have tried to raise this before we did audits that progress was not at the desired level in terms of ensuring that all matters were investigated in the department,” she said.
The NAC has so far paid out R307m of the PESP funds, and was still in the process of paying out R1.9m to finalise its initiative, said Tsotetsi.
The NAC along with nine others, such as Freedom Park, The State Theatre in Tshwane and the Performing Arts of the Free State, received unqualified opinions with findings.
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