What Scopa should have made a bigger fuss over in RAF draft report

The shortcomings of the Road Accident Fund (RAF) under Collins Letsoalo’s leadership are well documented. Key areas of concern include procurement irregularities in his personal security spending and financial mismanagement surrounding the fund’s media expenditure.

Catch up

Scopa finally lays criminal charges against former Road Accident Fund CEO Collins Letsoalo

June 3, 2026

Among the latter findings lurks the infamous SABC news clock saga, in which the RAF made a massive unauthorised prepayment of R22.35-million (excluding VAT) along with an R894,159 agency commission for the SABC TV news clock premium spot.

This transaction happened while the RAF’s marketing department was “cold” and was the specific transaction that triggered the suspension of senior marketing manager Hlami Mathye.

And, of course, there was the R48,300 bucket hat.

Then there’s the default rate. To receive compensation, a claimant must prove “fault” (negligence). This forces claimants and the fund into an adversarial, litigious environment. Nearly 80% of all civil trials in South African courts are RAF matters, and the overwhelming majority of them are settled “on the doorstep of the court” after years of costly preparation.

The latest Performance Committee on Transport briefing for the first quarter of the 2026/27 financial year (1 April to 30 June 2026) showed that 1,775 default judgments were granted against the RAF in just three months.

That’s a 29% default rate across all trial matters on the court roll. Why? Because there was no state attorney to represent the RAF.

Collapse of the paper improvements

But a more careful reading across all the audited reports this side of the current decade (and a good listen of the hearings) reveals that the RAF’s executive management repeatedly pointed to their steady improvement in achieving annual performance plan (APP) targets – which climbed from 57% in 2019/20 to 91% in 2022/23 and 92% in 2023/24 – as proof of a successful turnaround.

It’s a shame, then, that claims registered plummeted from 258,000 a year to just 80,000. And direct claims fell from 33,000 in 2020 to 2,894 in 2024.

The RAF achieved these high APP scores by altering, rescoping or completely deleting targets they were failing to meet.

For example, the board successfully requested the minister of transport to exclude the target for “Elimination of Wasteful and Fruitless Expenditure” from its performance analysis, claiming it was impractical.

Key operational targets, such as the Integrated Claims Management System roll-out, were repeatedly rescoped or delayed when deadlines were missed. The turnaround was a paper exercise; actual service delivery to road accident victims collapsed by over 70%.

Conjuring dangerous myths

Daily Maverick has reported that the previous administration boasted of a R1.8-billion surplus in 2020/21 and improving solvency ratios.

The historical data, however, reveals that this surplus was manufactured by combining a change in accounting standards (Ipsas 42) with operational paralysis.

By adopting Ipsas 42 and simultaneously slowing down claims finalisation by 70%, the RAF artificially kept massive liabilities off its balance sheet.

If a claim was not processed or finalised, it did not meet the eligibility criteria under Ipsas 42, meaning it was not recognised as a liability.

This wiped R300-billion in liabilities off the books on paper, allowing the RAF to claim financial health while an enormous backlog of unpaid claims silently accumulated in the background.

For context

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November 27, 2025

If that’s not enough to knock out the load-bearing structure of the RAF’s argument, then you can always look to a central pillar of the public relations campaign: that the fund was transitioning to a direct settlement model to bypass rent-seeking attorneys and legal intermediaries.

Those free-falling claims numbers expose this as a myth.

Instead of bypassing lawyers, the RAF's decision to fire its panel of attorneys in 2020 (and you’ll need to add in the 57% vacancy rate in its legal division to appreciate the full weight of this cockup) meant the fund routinely failed to represent itself in court.

This operational collapse directly drove that 29% default judgment rate, siphoning billions of rands of the public fuel levy into statutory interest, sheriff costs and punitive court fees rather than direct victim compensation.

Bonus round

The most audacious play hidden in the RAF disclosures has to be the disconnect between audit outcomes and executive compensation.

Despite presiding over five consecutive years of adverse and disclaimer audit opinions from the Auditor-General, and overseeing a historic collapse in actual claims processing, the RAF’s executives awarded themselves massive performance bonuses:

• Collins Letsoalo (CEO): Received a R2.8-million performance bonus;

• Bernice Potgieter (CFO): Presided over five years of modified audit opinions and received a R900,000 performance bonus; and

• Other senior executives: Received performance bonuses of R447,000 on top of generous travel, acting and fringe benefits.

While Scopa spent months investigating Mjayeli Security’s R20-million contract and a few creative agency invoices, the historical data shows that the RAF’s executive team successfully structured their internal performance metrics to trigger massive personal payouts even as the fund’s actual operational capacity, financial solvency, and service delivery to South Africa’s most vulnerable road accident victims completely collapsed.

We do not presume to know what shape the final report will take and what further examples of maladministration will be unveiled, but on current evidence there is more than enough rope to tie things up. DM