for agriculture, he took with him two of the department’s most senior
financial officials, Seipati Dlamini, the chief financial officer for the
cooperative governance and traditional affairs segment of the
department, and Mmuso Tsoametsi, the CFO for human settlements.
Dlamini became CFO at agriculture under Zwane, where she got
herself tangled up in the Vrede dairy mess. She was arrested and
charged over the matter along with agriculture HOD Peter Thabethe in
early 2018.^26 Tsoametsi became a deputy director-general at
agriculture.^27
Mpho Mokoena, the HOD for human settlements at the time of the
R 1 -billion spending spree, was also quietly moved to another job. He
became head of human settlements at the Mangaung metro
municipality.
Sources close to the matter say those four officials – Zwane, Dlamini,
Tsoametsi and Mokoena – should have answered for the debacle at the
FSHS. ‘They were the ones who were getting the instructions from
higher up to pay the companies and they were the ones who had the
power inside the department to make sure the payments went through,’
said one former insider. ‘There is no way that a provincial department
can spend R 1 billion without the approval or involvement of its MEC,
HOD and financial heads.’
The FSHS’s inability to build houses, meanwhile, was starting to
cause unrest and tension in some parts of the province. One tragic day
in April 2011 , Andries Tatane, a resident of the eastern Free State town
of Ficksburg, was shot dead by police during a violent service-delivery
protest. He quickly became a martyr of sorts in the intermittent battle
between government authorities and some of the country’s poorest
communities. One of the issues Tatane and his fellow protesters were
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