SIU investigation into lottery corruption hamstrung by red tape:
Almost 15 months after the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) applied for an amendment to the Presidential Proclamation authorising it to look into lottery corruption, the department of justice and constitutional development is yet to submit its recommendation to President Cyril Ramaphosa on whether to grant it.
The original October 2020 proclamation allowed the SIU to only investigate grants made by the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) from 1 January 2014 to 7 November 2020.
Since then, several independent audits commissioned by the NLC have also uncovered fraud, corruption and extensive circumvention of “procurement processes” running into hundreds of millions of rand.
But the narrow terms of the original proclamation have left the SIU hamstrung and unable to investigate the NLC procurement and appointments of service providers. The NLC is also unable to investigate potentially fraudulent or corrupt grants that fall outside the window of the 2020 proclamation.
A backlog of applications for SIU proclamations built up during the tenure of former justice and constitutional development minister Thembi Simelane, who was moved to the human settlements portfolio after she was exposed for “dubious” dealings involving the now defunct VBS Mutual Bank.
A flurry of new proclamations has been granted this year after the appointment of her replacement, Mmamoloko Kubayi, in December last year.
But the SIU’s National Lotteries Commission application, submitted in April last year, has been gathering dust.
Red tape
An Institute for Security Studies (ISS) report on the future of the SIU, released last week, found that the proclamation process is mired in red tape. The resulting delays at the justice department “have sometimes amounted to several years”, according to the ISS.
“This has frustrated the recovery of funds, which can be hidden or dissipate quickly,” the ISS says. “In turn, this might delay the referral of cases to the NPA [National Prosecuting Authority], resulting in the loss of evidence and slow down disciplinary processes for state employees”.
The ISS has recommended that SIU motivations for presidential proclamations should rather be handled by the Presidency.
Terrence Manase, spokesperson for the justice ministry, said last week that the SIU’s amendment application has not yet reached the minister’s office.
“The ministry acknowledges the seriousness of the matter and remains committed to ensuring that all allegations of corruption are addressed appropriately, within the confines of the law,” he said.
GroundUp reported in 2023 that the SIU was planning to ask for an extension of its mandate. It was submitted in April 2024.
Mashudu Netshikwera, who heads up the SIU’s team investigating the NLC, told parliament in May that the application for an extension was submitted almost a year earlier in April 2024.
Justice department spokesperson Kgalalelo Masibi said “the department is currently attending the request for an amendment”.
She said the department had “raised certain concerns with the SIU, which the SIU has since addressed. The department has completed its assessment of the request and will be advising the minister and the Presidency in due course.”
Millions in dodgy procurement deals
The findings of the independent investigations commissioned by the NLC’s new board and executive were key in formulating disciplinary charges against implicated staff, including National Lotteries Commission chief operating officer Phillemon Letwaba and former NLC company secretary Nompumelelo Nene.
Among the issues flagged in damning reports by the auditor general and the independent auditors were irregular expenditure on information technology and sky-high spending on lawyers. The NLC struggled to answer a written parliamentary question about its expenditure on legal fees, as key files with details of multimillion-rand litigation expenditure have vanished.
Another area of concern is the tens of millions of rand in spending on media and communications, with a disproportionate amount paid to the Sunday World newspaper.
Millions of rand in dodgy payments were also made to NLC service providers, including a nearly R500,000 payment to service provider Neo Consulting to investigate a computer hack that never happened.
ProEthics, which advised the NLC on ethics when the organisation was overwhelmed by rampant corruption, was used to circumvent procurement processes. The NLC paid ProEthics more than R28.4 million. The company, in turn, said it paid other service providers, which it had no part in appointing, on the NLC’s instructions.
Bureaucracy not required by SIU Act
The Institute for Security Studies report says the SIU is “unnecessarily hampered” by delays in the administrative processing of presidential proclamations.
First, the SIU had to assess complaints it received “against the requirements of the SIU Act to determine whether it had jurisdiction”.
If the complaint met these criteria, the SIU must then “submit a motivation for a proclamation to the president via the justice department. A directorate in the [department] again assesses the motivation to see whether it meets jurisdictional requirements and is feasible,” the ISS report found.
“If so, the directorate sends it to the director general of the [department], who may escalate it to the deputy minister, the minister, and ultimately the president for approval.”
These delays “frustrate the purpose of the SIU Act, which is to provide for the swift recovery of state funds. The process of approvals by different justice department officials has evolved through a series of executive decisions and is not required by the SIU Act.”
SIU owed R1 billion
Since 2001, 300 presidential proclamations have been issued, the ISS said. “Of these, 164 (55%) have been issued since 2018, during President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration. In the 2024-25 financial year alone, 49 proclamations were issued. Five proclamations have been reported to date in the current year.”
The SIU gets its funding from two sources: a budget from the justice department, and it can also bill the institutions it investigates for the services provided and retain these funds.
But many of its clients, which are all state institutions, were not paying for the SIU’s services, as they are required to do.
As of March 2024, the SIU had a debt book exceeding R1 billion owed by 272 state institutions, the ISS found. This led to the SIU launching Project Khokela in October 2024, with letters of demand being issued to these institutions for prompt debt settlement.
“Given the high number of new proclamations, the SIU is likely to face financial strain over the next 24 months. If unresolved, its financial reserves could be depleted in the foreseeable future.”
This story was first published by GroundUp
Small win for activists, but SA’s HIV projects won’t reopen:
The $ 400 million the United States Congress removed from a list of programmes from which the Trump administration will now take back previously approved but unspent funds doesn’t mean the cuts to global HIV and TB programmes in February, including those in South Africa, are now reversed.
HIV projects that have closed in South Africa, which were formerly funded by the US government, won’t restart as a result of this decision.
In fact, quite the opposite.
The “limited Pepfar waiver” that President Donald Trump announced in February remains in place. That means no HIV prevention activities, unless they intend to stop pregnant and breastfeeding women from infecting their babies, can be paid for with US government money, and projects that make it easier for teen girls and young women in Africa, trans people, sex workers, injecting drug users and gay and bisexual men — groups of people that have a higher chance to get HIV than the general population — cannot be funded.
Without a proper explanation for it, the $ 400 million seems to be a random amount that President Donald Trump’s administration picked to take back from Pepfar, a US government programme which funds Aids projects in poorer countries with high HIV infection rates, such as South Africa.
The amount is about 8.5% of Pepfar’s $ 4.725 billion budget for this financial year and was part of a larger $ 9.4 billion ”rescissions package” — that has now been reduced to $ 9-billion and passed as the HR4 Rescissions Act of 2025.
Rescissions happen when the presidential administration wants to cancel funding that was approved by Congress and then use it for something else.
What the decision to remove the $ 400 million from the package does, however, mean is that activism could finally be starting to pay off.
Activists have had hundreds of meetings with US senators and Congress committee chairs. There have been ”Save Pepfar” social media campaigns, and plenty of media coverage about the devastating consequences of the funding cuts. Tens of modelling studies have also projected what could happen if the lost funds are not replaced.
Opposition from within Trump’s Republican Party against nonevidence-based cuts to a programme that has, for two decades, been supported by both the Democrats and Republicans and has saved more than 25 million lives, is now at last emerging.
“It’s a small win within the bigger context, but nonetheless, a huge win for advocacy, and a reminder that activism is powerful and alive, and making an impact,” Jirair Ratevosian, a former head of staff at Pepfar and fellow at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, told Bhekisisa at last week’s Conference on HIV Science in Kigali.
About $ 8 billion of the money was for foreign aid and development programmes, including global health, and just over $ 1 billion for public broadcast stations that the Trump administration has accused of being biased because they’re too liberal.
But the Rescissions Act is, in itself, bad news.
“It opens the floodgates for the Trump administration to say ‘we don’t want this or that in the budget that Congress approved’, says Mitchell Warren, the head of international advocacy organisation, Avac. “It’s trying to take the congressional power of the purse and put it in the executive branch to usurp the role of Congress in deciding how much money — and on what to spend it.”
So how did this all happen, and does it hold any good in the long term for South Africa? We break it down.
- How did we get here?
In the US, the Congress — which consists of the Senate and the House of Representatives — decides how much government money goes to who, just like Parliament does in South Africa. Both the Senate and the House have to pass budgets.
But, as analysts at the Centre for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, DC, point out, Trump wants more control over how his administration’s money is spent.
In March, he signed the 2025 budget that Congress approved into law. Three months later, in June, he decided he wanted to change some of that and submitted a $ 9.4 billion rescission request, which the House of Representatives (it has five more Republican than Democrat members) passed on June 12. When it was the Senate’s turn to vote on this, some Republican senators weren’t happy with the $ 400 million Pepfar cut, signalling they wouldn’t sign off on the deal unless the Pepfar part was removed.
Because there was a danger of them swinging the vote, the Republicans removed the $ 400 million from the Rescissions Bill and got the House to pass that too. All that’s left is for Trump to now sign the Act.
- What was the $ 400 million that was removed from the Rescissions Act for?
In short, no one really knows, because the Trump administration hasn’t said what it was for — or what it plans to do with it. But what we do know is that the US law that governs rescissions, the Impoundment Control Act, says the president can only request that Congress takes back funding that it previously approved, if the money has not yet been obligated — that means funds hadn’t yet been given to a particular recipient, for instance, an HIV project in South Africa.
We also know that the $ 400 million was part of the financial budget for 2025, says Warren, but because the law gives Pepfar permission to spend money over five years, that money doesn’t have to be legally spent until 2029.
- What will the $ 400 million now be used for?
Again, no one knows. We don’t even know if it will be used, because over the past few months, the Trump administration’s main strategy has “simply been to illegally impound funds — by announcing a ‘funding freeze’ or ‘programmatic review’ with no public notice at all — and force those harmed by the impoundments to pursue relief in court”, the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities explains in an analysis.
But we do know what the money can’t be used for.
Unless the rules of Trump’s “limited waiver” are changed, Pepfar funds can mostly not be spent on any of the evidence-based strategies it paid for before President Trump was elected in January. Pepfar used to focus on groups of people and areas where people have the highest chance of getting infected with HIV — that way, the programme got the biggest bang for its buck.
In South Africa, for instance, Pepfar worked in the 27 districts with the highest infection rates and groups known as “key populations” — sex workers, gay and bisexual men, trans people, injecting drug users and African women between the ages of 15 and 24 — that are much more likely to get newly infected with HIV than other South Africans.
Now those projects, which studies show stopped many new infections, have been closed down and the Trump administration says it’s not prepared to buy HIV prevention medicine for any group other than pregnant and breastfeeding women. “It used to be all about evidence,” Warren says. “Now it’s all about ideology.”
- What do scientists and activists want the $ 400 million to be used for?
Ratevosian says this moment should be used to gain Republican support to change the waiver rules, so that Pepfar money can cover more of the populations and services needed for HIV prevention.
Lenacapavir, a pricey twice-a-year anti-HIV jab, which scientists believe could help to stop HIV in its tracks if it’s rolled out properly, could be used to convince Republican Congress members, says Ratevosian. “Pepfar has long wanted to get countries to transition to taking more ownership [read: pay more] for their HIV responses. So now activists are arguing: ‘Preventing more new infections with the jab, will make it easier for countries to take ownership because the pandemic will be easier to manage.’”
In December, Pepfar said it would join another organisation, the Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria to buy enough lenacapavir for two million people over three years. But in July, the Global Fund had to go ahead with the deal by itself, because Pepfar seemed to no longer be on board.
Warren says: “If I were in charge, I would take the $ 400 million and double the two million people the Global Fund is planning to cover, because that’s how you build a market, prevent new infections more quickly and drive the price down.”
- What will Pepfar look like in future?
Trump’s funding cuts didn’t kill Pepfar — at least not in theory — but it’s a shell of its former self.
What it will look like, will depend on the size of its next budget (the Trump administration wants to cut it by 40% but, so far, the House hasn’t agreed to that, (the Senate still needs to sit on it) and how much support Republicans who believe in Pepfar can gain to have waiver rules changed.
“We’re not going to get pre-January projects back; we have to build something different,” Warren points out.
“This has been the most seismic shift in democracy. We didn’t think we lived in an earthquake zone, but January 20 [when Trump retook office] taught us: you need to be prepared for that earthquake and you therefore need a different infrastructure.
“In an earthquake you don’t build back the same thing. You build better, something that is more resilient.”
This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.
The spiritual hustle of Young Stunna:
In a time when algorithm-driven trends can snatch the spotlight, Young Stunna is a refreshing blend of street-bred honesty, spiritual grounding and artistic finesse.
His music doesn’t beg to become viral. It doesn’t chase gimmicks. Instead, it lingers. Like the taste of your mother’s dombolo or an old hymn. It’s music that stays. It carries the perfume of home, dusted with gold from the grind.
When Young Stunna, born Sandile Msimango, speaks, it’s with the cadence of someone who’s lived many lives in one, an East Rand prophet cloaked in tracksuits and township slang, his verses emerging from joy, pain, faith and youthful stubbornness.
The connection with Swayvee (Nigerian singer Ezekiel Georgewill), for instance, wasn’t some boardroom strategy or a forced vibe. It was born of what his generation now calls digital divinity, Instagram DMs.
“It was casual,” he says, “but it got deep fast.”
The remix of Us was never done in a shared booth or with chest-thumping announcements. It was born in virtual silence but pulsed with a loud energy. Remote, yet not removed.
Why does Us sound different? Why does it hit you where your emotions are softest?
Young Stunna answers not with industry jargon, but with heart: “The song is about love, but I wanted to show how work takes us away from our people. I’m always busy, flying, recording, performing … but the love never fades.”
There’s a sadness and a celebration in that answer, a duality he navigates with the ease of someone raised in the paradox of township life. He knows what it means to not have enough, and still make space for joy.
He says this remix wasn’t about dropping bars or trying to impress the streets. It was fun. “I just wanted people to fall in love more.”
And that’s the Young Stunna blueprint right there: make music that reminds us of our humanity.
Still, if you listen closely, there’s a spiritual labour happening in his sound. You hear it in how he balances kasi edge with ancestral softness.
“When the beat needs me to go street, I go street,” he says. “When it needs spirit, I channel that too.”
It’s not about code-switching, it’s a shapeshifting rooted in emotional fluency, cultivated by a life raised among elders and churchgoers.
What guides this process? Prayer before the session? No. “I pray when I wake up,” he says.
The rest of it? Vibes. Real-life inspiration?
“I don’t have a routine,” he says. “I just get in and work. Stop playing.”
It’s raw, unscripted, led by feeling and guided not by trends, but by truth.
Young Stunna’s next sonic wave is already brewing. Think nineties nostalgia, but refracted through new-age soul.
“It’s another spiritual journey,” he says. “Just listen with your heart — the rest shall follow.”
That sentence alone feels like a mantra. Something you might paint on a wall in Daveyton for dreamers walking to school with dust on their shoes and music in their bones.
Fame hasn’t changed him. If anything, it’s taught him to be quieter.
“Keep your mouth shut,” he offers when asked about his biggest lesson from the limelight. Not out of fear but because when your music speaks this loud, your mouth doesn’t need to.
Although Amapiano carries him from township corners to international stages, Stunna remains rooted.
“We don’t forget where we come from,” he says. “We just add sounds to make it better. But we can always go back.”
He’s not just referencing home geographically, he’s talking about soul, community, the origin of rhythm.
And it’s that depth that’s unexpected from someone who wears the name “Young Stunna”. His maturity didn’t come from books or studios. It came from growing up in a home steeped in hlonipha (respect).
“Everyone who comes out of my house is respectful,” he says. “So, I make music that doesn’t disturb the peace. It’s beautiful music, led by guidance from legends.”
When it comes to collaboration, he isn’t chasing clout. He’s chasing connections.
“We don’t just make music. We love making music,” he explains about the culture at Piano Hub.
It’s a sentiment that mirrors the spiritual work of music-making, each beat treated as an offering.
And then there’s his dream team: Aymos, Focalistic, Murumba Pitch, with Scorpion Kings and Vigro Deep on production. “Different cultures, one rhythm.”
You can almost hear the future dancing its way through that lineup, music not just for radio, but for weddings, taverns and church halls.
What does he want to leave behind? “Nothing. I just want people to carry on changing the world.”
That’s it. No grand ambition to be remembered as a pioneer or a king. Just someone who gave everything and left space for others to do it 10 times better.
And if he wasn’t doing music?
Fashion. Styling. “I love clooooothes.”
The origin story of Young Stunna is no fairy tale. Daveyton wasn’t soft. “It’s either you fall for the corner, or you discipline yourself and get out.”
He talks about schools, dedicated teachers and church services held in sitting rooms. The moment he knew music was it? Grade 5, stomping feet with his friend Tumelo in a school bus, making beats with nothing but rhythm and imagination.
“Paid for our first studio session that same year,” he says, “and my life changed.”
That image of two kids turning a bus ride into a jam session seems the most accurate metaphor for Young Stunna’s music: movement, laughter, struggle, community, spirit and noise turned into art.
There’s no pretence in him. No mask. Just a man doing what he’s born to do. And in doing that, he reminds us that even in the chaos, we can find rhythm. We can still fall in love. We can remember home. And we can sing our stories loud enough for the world to hear, but quiet enough to stay grounded in who we are. And for Young Stunna, that’s more than enough.
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