Inside the alleged fight against the clean-up at the Department of Basic Education

On 27 March, Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube did something highly unusual for a Cabinet Minister. She published an open letter in which she warned the public that her decision to bring in the Special Investigating Unit to conduct lifestyle audits was likely to cause trouble.

“In the coming days and weeks, you will witness a concerted fightback from those who stand to lose the most from this clean-up,” Gwarube wrote.

She predicted the use of bot campaigns on social media, the misuse of parliamentary processes, and planted media stories – all to discredit Gwarube and her reform agenda.

The tone of the open letter was both urgent and concerning.

“I ask for your vigilance in the next few weeks,” Gwarube wrote in conclusion.

What she did not give was any details about what, exactly, had driven her to write this extraordinary public appeal.

After speaking to department insiders and drawing on the help of Murmur, a digital intelligence firm, Daily Maverick has gathered a picture of a DA Minister in the GNU allegedly being strategically and continuously undermined by some of the key departmental officials on whose work the Minister is supposed to rely.

If these allegations are true, it also raises the wider concern about whether a similar situation, pushing back on attempts at reform, could be playing out in other departments now helmed by non-ANC Ministers.

Special briefings for ANC MPs

Among the stand-out claims made to Daily Maverick on condition of anonymity by Department of Basic Education (DBE) insiders was that some senior officials, including department Director-General Hubert Mathanzima Mweli, have been meeting with the ANC’s parliamentary study group in advance of parliamentary basic education committee meetings – allegedly to arm them with material on Gwarube designed to look damaging.

This is in conflict with the government’s own policy that the public service must be depoliticised.

Daily Maverick sent questions regarding Mweli and the broader allegations to the DBE. Department spokesperson Terence Khala responded: “I have consulted the DG [director general] and we respectfully wish not to comment.”

“They [the officials in question] are all ANC-aligned,” one insider claimed.

“They get summoned by the ANC study group to go brief them, and they take internal department information for them.”

Asked for comment on this, Gwarube’s spokesperson Lukhanyo Vangqa said the Minister would not comment on Mweli specifically – but Vangqa confirmed that the briefing practice was known to be happening and was a source of concern.

“The Minister is aware that departmental officials have been sharing internal information and documents with the ANC’s study group,” Vangqa said.

“These political study meetings involving departmental officials will become a thing of the past. No official may share internal documents with political parties outside mandated parliamentary processes where all parties are represented.”

Chairperson of Public Interest SA Tebogo Khaas told Daily Maverick that these allegations, if accurate, were of serious concern.

“Any practice whereby departmental officials selectively brief party-political structures, particularly in a manner that may prejudice oversight processes or confer an advantage to one party over others, would be deeply problematic,” Khaas said.

“At the same time, it is important that these allegations are properly verified.”

ANC MPs in the parliamentary basic education committee have clashed with Gwarube on several occasions in recent months, in particular over the filling of certain senior posts.

A statement by the ANC parliamentary caucus on 25 March accused Gwarube of the “flagrant abuse of human resource processes”, and of revealing “the ugly face of the DA’s cadre deployment”.

The statement came a day after Gwarube had appeared before the parliamentary committee after being summoned to account for the HR concerns. The committee is chaired by an ANC MP, Joy Maimela.

In the committee’s own statement after the meeting, Maimela declared herself “unconvinced by the explanations provided by Minister Gwarube and the DBE”, and announced that the committee would seek legal advice.

The HR saga: Part 1

The HR issue seemingly being used to sow public concern about Gwarube centres on the filling of two important posts: deputy director-general in charge of curriculum policy, and the chief director of communications.

The allegation in terms of the communications role is that Gwarube, through ministerial staff, attempted to alter the relevant job ad and also requested both an “A-list” and “B-list” of shortlisted candidates, allegedly in order to favour the two applicants she hoped to appoint to the role.

Insiders sympathetic to Gwarube say this is a distortion of events, and that the Minister requested that the job ad include the line that a postgraduate degree would be an advantage.

The officials “ignored this, even though numerous government departments include the same requirement on job ads,” one said.

“The Minister suspected that the job ad was being phrased deliberately vaguely in order to favour one candidate,” the insider said. The candidate in question is believed to be a spokesperson for a current ANC MEC in Gauteng.

“They just want their people in. There’s a lot of ‘eating opportunities’ [slang for possible corruption avenues] in communications because there’s a lot of big events [in DBE] with corporate partners,” they added.

The insider said that Gwarube had asked HR to produce an A-list and B-list of applicants because she had become aware that two well-qualified candidates for the communications role – both professional journalists – were inexplicably missing from the shortlist.

The South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) has since weighed in to accuse Gwarube of attempting to “influence key stages of the recruitment process” because Gwarube allegedly favoured “an SABC journalist and a News24 journalist” for the position.

Gwarube would not be drawn on the specifics of the matter in response to Daily Maverick’s questions, but responded through her spokesperson: “The Minister has expressed her displeasure about what appears to be a reluctance to improve the quality of candidates that are attracted to senior positions in the department”.

Vangqa also told Daily Maverick: “The Minister is aware of a case in which individuals have indicated that they submitted applications timeously through the proper channels, yet those applications do not appear to have been properly accounted for in the process”.

The HR saga: Part 2

The conflict over the filling of the deputy director-general role in charge of curriculum policy rests on a complaint raised by ANC MPs, seemingly from leaked information, that Gwarube ultimately recommended the second-best-scoring candidate for appointment rather than the top-scoring candidate.

Gwarube has not denied that this was the case, but maintains it is within the Minister’s executive authority to do so.

She told Parliament last week that she had recommended a different candidate to that chosen by the department’s selection panel based on interview performance and overall suitability for the role.

Gwarube told the parliamentary committee that she wanted to state “on the record” that “I have never met the individual that I have recommended. I have never heard of her before they applied. I don’t know this individual and I have never interacted with them.”

Insiders insist that the real issue underlying these recruitment disputes is that Gwarube’s desire to fill these posts with the best-qualified individuals clashes with the agendas of certain top DBE officials.

“If you want to capture a department, you capture HR – because they then manipulate who gets appointed,” one said.

The mysteriously unpopular SIU lifestyle audits

The real cat among the pigeons, insiders allege, is Gwarube’s insistence on bringing in the SIU to conduct lifestyle audits – which are known to be exceedingly thorough, and in some cases involve the submission of years’ worth of bank statements – on top department officials.

Daily Maverick understands that certain officials attempted to convince Gwarube that the SIU audits, which will cost around R5-million, were too expensive and also unnecessary, given that the Department of Public Service and Administration already requires public servants to declare their interests.

Vangqa told Daily Maverick that the officials due to be audited are the “Director-General, Deputy Directors-General, and senior officials and officials in functions that carry elevated governance and corruption risk, including human resources and supply chain management”.

He said that the Minister would not speculate about whether there was resistance to the audits.

“What she can say is that officials committed to clean governance should welcome reasonable accountability measures designed to strengthen public confidence and protect the integrity of the department,” he said.

Daily Maverick asked digital intelligence firm Murmur to analyse recent social media activity to see if there was evidence of any form of potentially coordinated bot campaign targeting Gwarube.

Murmur confirmed that posts critical of Gwarube “spiked after her call for the Special Investigating Unit to conduct lifestyle audits”.

“This has all the hallmarks of a coordinated influence campaign, generating about 5,000 posts overall so far,” Murmur director Kyle Findlay told Daily Maverick.

Findlay said that, as is typical of these campaigns, it rested largely on a “cohort of influencers all cross-amplifying each others’ content to give the illusion of real conversation”.

Daily Maverick asked Gwarube’s spokesperson for comment on Murmur’s findings.

“The question should be asked about who has the financial resources to mount such a campaign, and what they stand to gain for investing in the campaign against the Minister,” Vangqa said.

“What was the funder of the campaign promised, and by who?” DM