South Africa: Land Officials to Explain Accounting Anomalies
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
8 October 2008
Posted to the web 8 October 2008
Stephan Hofstatter
Johannesburg
THE land affairs department is expected to give an account today of huge discrepancies between what its financials said it spent on buying farms for land reform and properties listed in its land asset register.
In its report on the department's financials tabled in Parliament last week, the auditor-general found an unexplained difference of R824m between amounts disclosed in its statements and those noted in the proactive land acquisition pro-gramme register.
The programme was aimed at speeding up land reform by allowing provincial land affairs offices to buy large numbers of properties and lease them to newly settled black farmers. They would be screened for suitability before full transfer.
But its budget allocations were scaled back after it fell out of favour with treasury last year when officials bought land without identifying future farmers, in effect creating state farms.
The register discrepancies form part of assets worth R1,15bn disclosed in the department's financials for which the auditor-general could not find sufficient audit evidence, the report said.
Spokesman Eddie Mohoebi said the department would issue a detailed statement today to account for discrepancies referred to in the qualified audit.
The audit found insufficient evidence to account for grant commitments of R455m, interest earnings of R13m and livestock assets of R14,5m.
The Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU) has called on Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana to take responsibility for the qualified audit, and for the irregularities outlined in the Land Bank's annual report tabled last week.
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"With such large amounts of money, it is unacceptable that only officials are being brought to book," said TAU president Ben Marais.
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