Gangster State

Several sources, including department insiders and other government
officials, former Magashule allies and some FSHS contractors, all say
Mokhesi became the premier’s right-hand man in the department.
Under Mlamleli and Mokhesi’s stewardship, the FSHS would become
the site of even more egregious looting involving Magashule, his
associates and his direct family.
But first they had to help clean up the fallout from their new
department’s R 1 -billion mess. They deftly began tackling the problem
in a manner that made it appear as if they truly wanted to get to the
bottom of the fiasco.
In July 2012 , Mlamleli told the pro-Magashule newspaper The Weekly
that six department officials linked to the scam had been suspended.
The six suspended officials had allegedly made unlawful prepayments
to some of the companies involved in the scheme and had manipulated
the department’s individual subsidy system to make sure the
companies got paid, according to the news report. Department officials
had also done very few inspections to make sure that the contractors
were actually building houses. In her ‘exclusive’ interview with the
publication, Mlamleli vowed to ‘root out corruption’ at her new
posting.^36 In a subsequent annual report, the department explained that
there had been ‘collusion between employees and suppliers and
overriding of internal controls and the department’s information
systems’.^37
But according to my sources, the six suspended officials were just
scapegoats. ‘Those are all people on the level of director or chief
director,’ said one. ‘They reported to the MEC, the HOD and the CFOs,
so it made no sense that they alone were made out to be the
masterminds. Some of them may have been guilty of some